Cloud Provider Vultr Has Bone To Pick After Reddit Post

'We do think this person knows better,' chief marketing officer Kevin Cochrane tells CRN. ‘We’re HIPAA compliant. If our terms of service meant we owned your data, we wouldn’t be HIPAA compliant. We’re GDPR compliant. If we owned your data, we wouldn’t be GDPR compliant.’

Private cloud provider Vultr is clearing the air after a widely viewed Reddit post claimed the company had changed its terms of services in a way that would give it ownership of all of the data stored or used on its network.

“We do think this person knows better,” Vultr Chief Marketing Officer Kevin Cochrane told CRN Thursday. “We’re HIPAA compliant. If our terms of service meant we owned your data, we wouldn’t be HIPAA compliant. We’re GDPR compliant. If we owned your data, we wouldn’t be GDPR compliant.”

Cochrane said that the terms of services cited in the Reddit post referred specifically to content posted to a public message board that has not been active in some time.

“The content that you deploy on Vultr servers is wholly owned by you,” said Cochrane (pictured above).

He said West Palm Beach, Fla.-based Vultr did update its terms of service. However, it was only to notify customers that the company will suspend accounts that have been dormant for two years.

“That’s the reason everyone is having to click on this,” Cochrane said.

Cochrane said the company believes the Reddit post was designed to spread misinformation after Vultr was among the first cloud providers to offer customers the ability to use Nvidia’s GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip with their workloads.

“This is why the terms of service is such a concern for us. We specifically challenge the hyperscalers and other public clouds for using your private data for other purposes. business,” he said. “Our statement has always been ‘Your private data is your private data.’ “

The Reddit account that created the post has been active for five days. The post has 1,500 “upvotes” which gives the post added credibility inside Reddit’s platform. In it, the original poster claimed that Vultr changed its terms of service to state:

“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.”

Cochrane said this portion of Vultr’s terms of service relates just to messages and content shared on a public discussion forum that Vultr hosts and is not related to the data and apps that customers use on Vultr systems.

“The specific language in the post is, if you post content on one of our public mediums. IT was specific to when we had a forum. So if you are posting content on a forum, that forum is owned by us because we have to publicly publish it so other people can see the posts.”

He compared the language to tech debt that is no longer needed, but carried forward, through newer iterations. To avoid confusion, he said Vultr is stripping the language from its terms moving forward.

CRN has reached out to the person who penned the Reddit post but had not heard back at press time.

Vultr, a privately held cloud computing platform, has 1.5 million customers across 185 countries. It offers cloud computing infrastructure and resources spanning from bare metal options to GPU compute available on demand.

Backed by parent company Constant, Vultr provides shared and dedicated CPU, block and object storage, Nvidia cloud GPUs, as well as networking and Kubernetes solutions. The company’s mission is to make high-performance cloud computing easier to use, affordable and locally accessible.

Vultr is consistently expanding its data center footprint. In May 2023, Vultr Talon was launched to offer customers accelerating computing by enabling GPU sharing so multiple workloads can run on a single Nvidia GPU.