Vultr

Vultr

Basic Information
Release Year	2014
Product Type	Cloud Hosting
In Production	Yes
Official Website	https://www.vultr.com

As quoted from their website:

"Vultr, founded in 2014, is on a mission to empower developers and businesses by simplifying the deployment of infrastructure via its advanced cloud platform. Vultr is strategically located in 32 datacenters around the globe and provides frictionless provisioning of public cloud, storage and single-tenant bare metal.

Vultr has made it our priority to offer a standardized highly reliable high performance cloud compute environment in all of the cities we serve. Launching a cloud server environment in 32 cities around the globe has never been easier."

Among those cloud services are storage, servers, and databases.

Consumer-protection profile

Privacy

• Vultr collects industry standard information necessary to provide the service such as registration information, billing information, and IP addresses.
• Vultr also collects usage data when interacting with their services. This does not include the user's data stored on their servers.
• Vultr uses cookies to collect information when the user visits their website.
• Information Vultr collects is used to improve their services and shared with third-parties for marketing purposes including targeted advertisements.

Transparency

• Vultr has had major issues regarding their transparency in the past.
• The encryption of Vultr services has met many industry know certifications such as SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO 27001.
• As elaborated on further below, Vultr does not make clear what rights Vultr had in the past and presently has over your data.

Consumer-protection incidents

Vultr amends its terms of service (Jan. 2024)

In January 2024, Vultr amended its terms of service (TOS) to include a clause (12.1a) stating:

"You hereby grant to Vultr a non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, fully paid-up, worldwide license (including the right to sublicense through multiple tiers) to use, reproduce, process, adapt, publicly perform, publicly display, modify, prepare derivative works, publish, transmit and distribute each of your User Content, or any portion thereof, in any form, medium or distribution method now known or hereafter existing, known or developed, and otherwise use and commercialize the User Content in any way that Vultr deems appropriate, without any further consent, notice and/or compensation to you or to any third parties, for purposes of providing the Services to you.”

This clause originally did not affect existing users, but in March, Vultr asked users to accept its new terms, including that clause. This sparked outrage, including one Reddit post claiming Vultr has rights to use user data for the purposes of training artificial intelligence. This outrage prompted a response from Vultr in which the company stated:

"We value the feedback we receive from our customers, and we want to assure you that Vultr claims no rights to your content. Vultr has never claimed any rights to, used, accessed, nor allowed access to or shared your content, other than as may be required by law or for security purposes."

12.1a was quickly altered to remove Vultr's claim to a license. Despite the company's denial that access of the user's content is solely for security purpose, the wording of the TOS did not reflect this and was a major failure in transparency at best. As of January 2025, the most up-to-date terms of service by Vultr, the following clause (15.1c) remains:

"As between You and Vultr, Vultr acknowledges that it claims no proprietary rights in or to Your Content. You hereby grant to Vultr a non-exclusive, worldwide and royalty-free license to copy, make derivative works, display, perform, use, broadcast and transmit on and via the Internet Your Content, solely for the benefit of You and to enable Vultr to perform its obligations under these Terms."

Despite Vultr withdrawing the original clause, it is unclear what "for the benefit of You" means in this context, since that phrase does not appear anywhere else in the TOS.