from the network-is-not-in-the-right-state-to-be-restarted dept.
iwStack (based on Apache CloudStack) is Prometeus's scalable cloud brand, Infrastructure as a Service, Elastic resources and Pay-As-You-Go service, with servers in Milan (Italy [HQ]), Amsterdam (Netherlands), and Bucharest (Romania). Prometeus was bought in 2023 by CDLAN.
I couldn't find reviews since around 2015, that's why I decided to do one now in 2026. This is my experience the few times I've used it since 2021.
[...] CloudStack:
iwStack uses version 4.4.4 by the "about" link in the control panel. Version 4.4.1 is from october 2014, the tarball date of 4.4.4. says june 2015. Apache CloudStack's most recent release is 4.22.0.0. This is 18 major versions behind the current 4.22.0.0 release (November 2025), representing nearly 10 years without updates.
[...] I wanted to create a virtual router to test the load balancing. Never could get it to work. I had multiple problems creating and destroying the isolated network and its instances. then I tried again to no avail. The problem was the network remained allocated and not implemented. I added a firewall rule, maybe that spins up the virtual router instance, I thought to myself. Do I have to create another instance? I decided to check the tutorial, it says "(a virtual VM with a powerful router (though it lacks IPv6 capabilities for now) is automatically deployed".
[...] Conclusion:
iwStack offers very low-cost pre-paid cloud infrastructure suitable for basic use cases (simple instances with public IPs). However, it shows clear signs of minimal maintenance.
iwStack (based on Apache CloudStack) is Prometeus's scalable cloud brand, Infrastructure as a Service, Elastic resources and Pay-As-You-Go service, with servers in Milan (Italy [HQ]), Amsterdam (Netherlands), and Bucharest (Romania). Prometeus was bought in 2023 by CDLAN.
I couldn't find reviews since around 2015, that's why I decided to do one now in 2026. This is my experience the few times I've used it since 2021.
We begin with the usual disclaimers:
"This is a self managed service, this mean you need to know how to install, configure and manage O.S. and applications. You are also responsible for your data and you need to save it periodically so you can reload it in the event of any data loss. As mentioned in our TOS we don't keep any backup of your data so please backup your important data."
"We guarantee an annual average of 99% network availability for the infrastructure of our computer center ... The sending of spam mail is forbidden".
PLEASE NOTE THE FOLLOWING SITES ARE STRICTLY PROHIBITED. Sites which contain copyrighted material; porn sites; warez, hacker, pirated, torrent or leech sites; sites which promote bulk email software or spamming; sites that promote illegal activity; sites with content that may be damaging to the servers; spamming is STRICTLY PROHIBITED. Any sites that are brought to our attention because they are spamming will be immediately deleted from the root directory without advanced notice and your money will not be refunded. We reserve the right to remove any account without advanced notice for any reason we sees fit.
Control panel
CloudStack:
iwStack uses version 4.4.4 by the "about" link in the control panel. Version 4.4.1 is from october 2014, the tarball date of 4.4.4. says june 2015. Apache CloudStack's most recent release is 4.22.0.0. This is 18 major versions behind the current 4.22.0.0 release (November 2025), representing nearly 10 years without updates. It uses KVM, with API, virtual router: firewall, vpn, load balanced. You can upgrade or downgrade your instances. BTW, they installed as BIOS, not UEFI.
Network:
FREE Anycast DNS, Light DDOS Protected IP (up to 8 Gbps or 1 millions packets per seconds protection), Private isolated VLAN, Fiber Channel Hitachi HUS 150 SAN Storage, Double 10Gbps upstream connectivity. I haven't seen IPv6 in any config option.
ISOs:
Outdated. Luckily they added new ones in the last two years. This partial list is from this week:
Centos 6.6.x86_64 minimal
Centos 8.1.1911
Clonezilla Live CentOS6Based
CoreOS-83590-stable
Debian 11 netinstall
Debian 12.5.0 AMD64 netInst
Debian 13 Netinstall (This is from 2025)
Debian 7.1 32 netinst
debian-10.2.0-amd64-netinst
Fedora 19 64bit
Gentoo 2015-09-24
pfSense 2.1.1 64 bit
SME Server 9.2 x86_64
systemrescuecd-amd64-6.1.2
Ubuntu 16.04.1 amd64
Ubuntu 24.04.03 (From 2024)
ubuntu-22.04.2-live-server-amd64
UbuntuServer2004-64
You can also go with a template (outdated, too) when creating your instance, some of them are:
Alpine Linux 3.3.0 x86_64
Centos 8.1
Centos-6-64Bit-Minimal-10GB
Debian 7.2 64 bit minimal 40 GB version
Debian 9.4 amd64
Ubuntu 13.10 amd64 Minimal 40 GB disk
Ubuntu 14.04.4 64 Bit
Ubuntu Server 16.04 64 Bit
Ubuntu-1204-Server-32Bit KVM
Windows 2012 R2 Standard
Windows Server 2019
Windows-2008-Server-Standard
Luckily, you can register your own templates or ISO files, just fill the form with the URL to the image. If you do so they count towards your used space.
Pricing:
Pre-paid, the best IMHO, billed per hour of usage. First payment is 40 USD. After that you can top up 10 credits for 13 USD up till 200 credits for 260 USD.
This service allow you to access the iwStack IaaS cloud services in Italy / Netherlands / Romania. The one time fee will be converted to iwCredits (1 iwCredit = 1 Euro) when the account is approved. Usage is computed daily and iwCredit balance is consumed, additional iwCredits can be bought as addon from the service page.
Incoming traffic is free, each running instance includes 2 TB outgoing transfer, traffic is accounted and reset at 1st of each month. Additional outgoing traffic for the previous month is billed @ € 0.002 x GB transferred. Stopped computing instances are free, only the storage and the reserved IPs are charged.
Creating an instance
RAM 512MB
1 vCPU
1 IP
INCOMING TRANSFER free
OUTGOING TRANSFER includes 2TB per month
€/ Hour 0.003
€/ Month 2.16
Plus 5GB space:
Total
€ 0.0035 PER HOUR
€ 2.52 PER MONTH
SSD 12GB RAM
8 vCPU
1 ip
€/Hour 0.040
€/Month 28.80
Plus 5GB space:
Total
€ 0.0405 PER HOUR
€ 29.16 PER MONTH
My experience:
Quickview
Deployment time:
Overall, to create, stop or destroy an instance it took me from 3 to 13 seconds. Sometimes they are created all-right, but it took me 3 tries to create an ubuntu 24.4 instance. You can do a graphical install of the ISO via console (like VNC). I added a debian instance in Netherlands, the virtual console gave me access error http 503.
You can create volumes and take automatic snapshots of them. You can snapshot instances too. You can attach a volume to an instance. I tried to snapshot an instance but got an error: VM snapshot is not enabled for hypervisor type: KVM.
I wanted to create a virtual router to test the load balancing. Never could get it to work. I had multiple problems creating and destroying the isolated network and its instances. then I tried again to no avail. The problem was the network remained allocated and not implemented. I added a firewall rule, maybe that spins up the virtual router instance, I thought to myself. Do I have to create another instance? I decided to check the tutorial, it says "(a virtual VM with a powerful router (though it lacks IPv6 capabilities for now) is automatically deployed".
Installing Ubuntu Server
Uptime:
I've used it a few times since 2021, no problems there.
Support:
Friendly, by email, from 5 minutes to 10 hour. There is not much documentation, there are some tutorials and a free knowledge base.
Speedtest:
9pm UTC speedtest.net
Milano to Perugia (365km straight line) 559Mb/s down 626 Mb/s up
Milano to Milano 488Mb/s download, 258 Mb/s upload, upload latency 5 ms (the previous night I got 850 Mb/s up)
To Queenstown (almost Milano's antipode) 390Mb up, 223 down, upload lantency 388 ms
To Texas 329 Mb/s down, 258 Mb/s up, upload latency 388 ms
You can check their LookingGlass LookingGlass
--- VM Performance Review Report ---
OS: Debian GNU/Linux 13 (trixie)
Cores: 4
RAM: 3,8Gi
------------------------------------
Running CPU Benchmark (Calculating Primes)...
Result: 1359.88 events/sec
Running Memory Latency Test...
Result: 5163.74 MiB/sec MiB/sec
Testing Disk Write Speed (1GB sequence)...
104 MB/s
------------------------------------CPU: Aceptable, virtualized cores
RAM: Excelent (must be server DDR)
Disk: slow compared to a SSD--- My laptop i5 ---
OS: Ubuntu 25.10
Cores: 12
RAM: 7,5Gi
------------------------------------
Running CPU Benchmark (Calculating Primes)...
Result: 3263.98 events/sec
Running Memory Latency Test...
Result: 4285.38 MiB/sec MiB/sec
Testing Disk Write Speed (1GB sequence)...
665 MB/s
------------------------------------SSD option:
--- SSD VM Performance Review Report ---
OS: Debian GNU/Linux 13 (trixie)
Cores: 4
RAM: 5,8Gi
------------------------------------
Running CPU Benchmark (Calculating Primes)...
Result: 2482.89 events/sec
Running Memory Latency Test...
Result: 5495.90 MiB/sec MiB/sec
Testing Disk Write Speed (1GB sequence)...
479 MB/s
------------------------------------
As you can see even with SSD option, the 479 MB/s write speed is still slower than modern NVMe drives (665 MB/s on my consumer laptop), confirming the shared Hitachi HUS 150 SAN infrastructure rather than dedicated NVMe storage.
Why no recent reviews?
Reviews from external hosting forums in the past were good, but then the owner sold it. Now it seems to be in maintenance mode. Last post in the forum is from 2017.
Comparison:
I can't compare with other services, the only other cloud I've used was AWS years ago. Also, I'd never used CloudStack before this cloud provider.
Conclusion:
iwStack offers very low-cost pre-paid cloud infrastructure suitable for basic use cases (simple instances with public IPs). However, it shows clear signs of minimal maintenance.
Good if you need physical presence in Europe or Italy, for basic VMs with direct internet access where you manage everything yourself and development/testing environments. Pre-paid sold me but I wouldn't recommend it.
Feel free to recommend a cloud provider (real cloud) with good support, pre-paid is a plus. Also, feel free to comment on your personal experiences (the bad are funnier and more interesting).
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Wednesday February 04, @03:00PM
Kind of? Its a front end and the back end supports VMware and some less popular hypervisors (citrix, xcp-ng, etc) but not, IIRC, actual popular hypervisors like proxmox. Its also a front end for AWS, and its supposedly got support for OCCI which you can supposedly get to work on OpenStack... I was a small time OpenStack admin some time back, and I donno about that. In a strict technical sense its "supported" but I think the latest commit to openstack's "ooi" project was in the 2010s ooops.
My understanding of the apache project, is its an analogy to the terraform usecase but for web GUI people instead of being for scripts like terraform. So in theory if an admin wanted to move workload between AWS and vmware and who knows what else, they could transparently move it without the end user tenant type people knowing or caring. That use case kind of died out with the rise of K8S. Like if I want to move workload from the NAS to CEPH or whatever I do one StorageClass object and wham its done for the whole cluster, more or less.
Maybe terraform is more closely tied to the providers than cloudstack WRT abstraction. I guess if you don't like Ansible then both Terraform and Cloudstack would be reasonable alternatives.
The review is pretty good from an end user tenant PoV but just making the point that most of the bugs/inconveniences/issues mentioned are hypervisor level and cloudstack isn't a hypervisor, its a wrapper that can talk to multiple hypervisors and apparently OP had a rough time with the individual hypervisor they're middlemanning/reselling.
Maybe a really good analogy is if you've ever worked with OpenStack they put the web gui for the whole system in a separate package "Horizon" and Apache CloudStack is just a "Horizon" that can talk to multiple brands of hypervisors whereas "Horizon" can only talk to OpenStack projects.
The entire proxmox corporation only has a couple dozen employees but it seems more alive than the "500 person" openstack project. A lot of openstack is vanity nameplate people who don't commit code but really like having a name on the resume. The Apache Cloudstack project sounds more like openstack than like proxmox, so it may be a nameplate-people project rather than a code-commiter-people project.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Mojibake Tengu on Wednesday February 04, @03:16PM (3 children)
I bid my farewell then.
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 04, @04:34PM
WTF?
Demographic not literate?
Ewe Toob videos next that you can't shut off?
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 04, @04:46PM
Really! As if allowing unicode wasn't bad enough...
We reserve the right to remove any account without advanced notice for any reason we sees fit.
Sounds like a good reason to stay away. Those are the kinds of things we need to prohibit by law.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 05, @05:19AM
> I bid my farewell then.
Please don't go, I like your comments!(most of the time). Anyway, this isn't the first time, I've seen graphics on SN before (but not as large as this blast).
I think they have always been posted by an editor or other staff member(?)
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday February 04, @05:19PM (4 children)
The graphic is unreadable. I'm guessing the layout assumes a screen width that I don't have...and I'm on a desktop.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1) by jelizondo on Thursday February 05, @02:27AM (1 child)
I don't know what is wrong with your setup. I just checked thru my phone and the graphics are readable.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday February 05, @02:23PM
I'm using firefox on a desktop. The right edges of the image aren't visible.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 05, @05:14AM (1 child)
> a screen width that I don't have
At the bottom I found a horizontal slider to view the parts of the graphic that were off the right side of my laptop screen.
But, wtf is a graphic doing here on SN? I come here for restful green on black text (VT100 mode).
(Score: 2) by mrpg on Friday February 06, @12:25AM
How can you show a control panel in ASCII?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by digitalaudiorock on Wednesday February 04, @05:36PM
In my work I've had to get data from platforms using many different REST APIs and the like. For quite some time this tended to be pretty straight forward.
However recently, an increasing number of new products/platforms are starting to use crap like Prometheus and/or GraphQL, and will simply make you curse the day you were born.
Between the two I honestly can't figure out which one is the bigger over-engineered flaming pile of shit...which seems to be the trend with about everything in tech.