I have purchased Alibaba Cloud's VPS host since 2015. Although I no longer use it, I have gained a better understanding of Alibaba Cloud's VPS through exploration in the past few years. When a friend asks me what better VPS host I can recommend, if I ask about a domestic VPS, I will generally recommend using Alibaba Cloud VPS. If it is a foreign VPS, I will recommend considering Linode VPS. This suggestion is not to say how good Alibaba Cloud's VPS is, but because there are really few domestic VPS options. If you don't choose Alibaba Cloud, you can only use Tencent Cloud, Meituan Cloud, Qingyun, Baidu Cloud, NetEase Cloud... In horizontal comparison, Baidu Cloud and NetEase Cloud have really launched a lot of products in the field of cloud computing in recent years, but most of the products have been ignored. Meituan Cloud is backed by Meituan, but its products have not improved much. There are only a few computer rooms, and technical support is hard to find. The only one that can compare with Alibaba Cloud now is Tencent Cloud. At some point, Tencent Cloud should be said to be better than Alibaba Cloud. Unfortunately, Tencent Cloud started late and is not as popular as Alibaba Cloud. This can be seen from the official forums of the two companies. 
This article will combine my own experience and feelings of using Alibaba Cloud VPS and talk about the various "pitfalls" of Alibaba Cloud. For more VPS hosting tests, you can check out:
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1. The price is moderate, but there are a lot of additional expenses.
One of the reasons why I originally chose Alibaba Cloud VPS hosting was that it was affordable. Alibaba Cloud's domestic computer rooms are quite cheap. You can buy a VPS with 512Mb of memory for 50 yuan a month. However, this price is moderate only compared to other domestic hosting companies. Because if you compare Alibaba Cloud with foreign servers, Alibaba Cloud's VPS is still relatively expensive. The picture below shows the price Alibaba Cloud sells in Hong Kong, "only for local tycoons to build websites."
3. It is very famous, but its reputation among users is declining.
It goes without saying that Alibaba Cloud VPS is very famous, and it is estimated that there are many users now. The official promotion activity previously organized has now been changed to "Cloud Ambassador". It can be expected that the promotion will be canceled after a while. . After all, Godaddy did the same thing back then. Many grassroots webmasters promoted it for them, and the number of users increased. Now it is time to clean up the "market". Correspondingly, the reputation of Alibaba Cloud VPS seems to be going downhill. The first thing that is widely criticized is the IO reading and writing speed. If it is a cloud computing platform like Google Cloud, such poor IO is understandable. The problem is that after Alibaba Cloud acquired Wanwang, the IO of the VPS was just like that, which was really frustrating.
I have tested the UnixBench running score of Alibaba Cloud VPS before and it was relatively low. However, I recently tested it on one of my Alibaba Cloud VPS and found that the running score was slightly higher and the performance was normal. (Click to enlarge) 
4. Strong promotion, but after-sales support for Tai Chi
Alibaba Cloud VPS's promotion activities have always been very powerful. Various discounts are only for new customers, while old customers can only look at these coupons and "sigh". In fact, this cannot be blamed on the merchants. After all, merchants are all about attracting customers. The more customers, the more beneficial it is to the merchants. And old customers have become "product dependent". Regardless of whether it is good or not, they have to continue to use it. Regarding Alibaba Cloud VPS after-sales support, they like to "play Tai Chi". Is it because many small webmasters have some "technical problems" that are not "technical" in the process of using VPS? Generally, when submitting a work order, Alibaba Cloud's technology will provide a link address for you to fiddle with. Only when the problem cannot be solved will it "slowly" ask for IP, password, test data, etc. Often, solving the problem requires Several or even a dozen times.
5. The technology is profound, but the free functions are useless
The most convenient way to use Alibaba Cloud VPS is BA. The response speed is quite fast. As long as the correct information is provided, it is basically done in one go. In addition, in addition to VPS, CDN, domain names, databases, storage, etc. can be purchased and used separately. It can be said that Alibaba Cloud's products are large and comprehensive. Sometimes you may feel "confused" when you enter the backend.
In order to attract new customers, Alibaba Cloud has launched a "free package" that most people cannot apply for. For example, the personal free package includes cloud server ECS, load balancing, cloud database RDS, cloud database Redis version, and elastic public network. IP, object storage OSS, etc., but it is troublesome to apply for them, and various verifications take a long time. 
PS: Updated on August 17, 2017. The speed and performance evaluation results of Alibaba Cloud International Edition Singapore VPS host are better than those of Alibaba Cloud Domestic Edition. For details, please see: Alibaba Cloud International Edition Singapore VPS Host Performance Speed evaluation-the price/performance ratio is better than the domestic version of Alibaba Cloud.