Ask HN: What's your preferred VPS service for personal projects?

[oliverjudge]

Sometimes I feel spinning up a whole AWS band of services isn't necessary for small projects like a personal blog or a small web app. I've been looking into Linode and DO.

What services do you use for small personal projects?

[marktangotango]

For a static blog/site, there are lots of options like neocities, netlify, bitballoon, github pages etc...

I built a service that hosts static files and provides a CORS api to a 'backend as a service' that provides a database, captcha, and user management. My goal was to provide everything I'd need so I wouldn't have to go set up a server for ever little project I wanted to do. I welcome any and all feedback:

https://www.lite-engine.com

[atmosx]

Hm, interesting. So many solutions around. Anyway in page [1] you have a typo:

"The authorization token is public, and may be diabled at anytime to prevent abuse."

[1] https://www.lite-engine.com/blog/hello_world.html

[freestockoption]

OpenShift - you can get some instances for free

Cloudatcost - One time fee. The instance is laggy sometimes, but it's gotten better since they launched and I only paid ~$20 (after coupon) a couple years ago so not a terrible value.

self-host! - Since I like tinkering with bare metal, I have a server in my home that I CDN through CloudFlare. CloudFlare is mostly to shield my ip address and make it less obvious I'm hosting a server (inbound is HTTPS using CloudFlare origin certificates). Currently have a server that just runs Docker containers, but might try Xen.

[akulbe]

I second the self-hosting. I have a pretty beefy Dell PowerEdge that I use for work (self-employed) that is a vSphere host.

If I need something external, then Digital Ocean.

[btzll]

I use DigitalOcean, which has great speeds and network, but also use a dedicated server from WholesaleInternet, in which I host a few VPSs for development purposes.

[mtmail]

There was a discussion last week "Which VPN would you recommend?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12311366

My answer was https://privatepackets.io/ which spins up a DO instance for $3.

[chrisked]

Parent is asking about VPS not VPN. I did only realize after reading it twice too. Guess the VPN thread stayed top of my mind. ;)

[cunni]

I've been with various hosting providers, however as presiously mentioned linode are bang on the money for service and ive never had any issues with them in the past 5 years (i have multiple nodes with them.

However for development i host my own onsite vps's, with the use of xenserver and proxmox this gives the best environment to deploy any multitude of configurations.

Lastly i have some external testing/staging servers (not always vps nodes) that i use, these are miles cheaper than linode and other providers but not always as great in terms of support. These are hosted with OVH under their budget brand kimsufi. They also have a brand called Sostart and OVH and those are better supported brands.

I hope that helps you out!

[Hugodby]

Scaleway provide small ARM server begining from 3e/month

https://www.scaleway.com/

[stadeschuldt]

Scaleway has two plans for 3/month:

A: - 4 Dedicated ARM Cores - 2GB Memory - 50GB SSD Disk

B: - 2 x86 64bit Cores - 2GB Memory - 50GB SSD Disk

Does anybody have experience how these two compare performance wise? Is it better to have more (ARM)-cores or less (x86)-Cores?

[d0lph]

RamNode, super inexpensive, and I have never had any problems with them.

You can get a 512mb(RAM) server for $3.50/mo.

I was also looking at linode a while back, it looks pretty nice.

[emilburzo]

I use either a bare-metal server from online.net coupled with LXC to have multiple separated "servers".

Or just hosting them on my "server" at home (LXC again), which is actually a DIY beefy PC with an i7-4790 3.60GHz CPU, 32 GB RAM, 2 TB (RAID 1) HDD, APC UPS with a ~20 minute battery runtime, 100/100mbit fiber connection.

[mbrock]

I like to use GitHub Pages as much as possible (with CloudFlare TLS for custom domains).

For more dynamic stuff, AWS Lambda is my new best friend. I'm using it for a few projects and loving it.

For more long-running stuff I'm likely to use EC2, or for some things my dedicated Hetzner server.

[nogox]

Are you using Docker to deploy your project? If yes, check out hyper.sh. Insanely easy!

[asimuvPR]

Not a vps but I've had a good experience with webfaction. Good features, fair price and good support.

[a_lifters_life]

Digital Ocean $5 per month does fine for many of the applications i build.

[cdvonstinkpot]

97cents.net does WordPress (or other Softaculous-based stuff) for <$1/mo. or <$10/yr.

[kennu]

I prefer to use AWS services that don't require any "spinning up": CloudFront/ACS/S3 for static web files, API Gateway/Lambda for backend, IoT for websockets. It takes some effort to configure everything, but then there's pretty much zero maintenance involved, so you can move on to other projects and keep the old ones running at very low cost.

[kennu]

I think I got downvoted by someone who doesn't like AWS. Anyway, the purpose was to say that you don't have to spin up virtual machines on AWS if you build your app with the serverless paradigm, and that fits small projects well because of really low cost. Tools like Serverless can be used to automate most of this.

[nickthemagicman]

Do you need a VPS? Alot of PaaS have a free tier.

I use openshift, AWS and Heroku are good as well.

[curiousgal]

OVH if you're based in Europe/North Africa.

[wprapido]

digitalocean works fine for me

[BorisMelnik]

same, works great!