WingNews logo WingNews GitHub [2]
top | item 21172818

Ask HN: Where do you get your cheap servers?

75 points| Smithalicious | 6 years ago

As per the title, where do you guys get your cheap servers? I mean subscription-based, not server hardware. I'm a student and I'm looking for something cheap for hosting personal experiments and websites. Thought that people on HN might have the answer and be interested in the answer, too.

64 comments

order
[+] shpx|6 years ago|reply
There are at least 5 providers that will rent you a $5/month server: DigitalOcean, Lightsail, Linode, UpCloud and Vultr. There's a guy that publishes benchmarks of their $5 instance regularly

https://joshtronic.com/2019/09/02/vps-showdown-digitalocean-...

DigitalOcean is by far the most popular. Personally, I like Vultr because they also have $2.50 IPv6 only instances and you can upload your own ISO file if you want to try a less popular Linux distribution. Both services have similar user interfaces that are pretty good.

That being said, $60/year is still a lot. If you can get away with just a static site, try GitHub pages https://pages.github.com/. You only get one (unless you create GitHub organizations) but it's free. You can still have your own domain pointing to it with TLS (free through Let's Encrypt). You miss out on the fun of managing a Linux server unfortunately.

[+] bennofs|6 years ago|reply
Actually, you can have multiple github pages sites: just create a new repo with a branch named gh-pages. You can then add a CNAME to that as well.
[+] 52-6F-62|6 years ago|reply
Yep. I use DO and it’s been just fine for low traffic websites. They’ve been great to work with and very easy to use. But I only host personal projects and internal tooling projects with them. Can’t speak to scaling but my experience has been positive.
[+] core-questions|6 years ago|reply
It's all about the pre-cloud hosting providers.

Check out the Black Hat SEO forums - the people there generally are running all manner of sketchy services, bots, crawlers, etc. that need the cheapest compute available.

The old hosting providers often have deals that can get you more power than the equivalent Amazon machine for the same price. If you're looking to be able to host something that other people might use, this is a solid way to go; just make sure you build something that it's easy for you to re-deploy elsewhere (i.e. at the very least have all your code in a separate revision control system, and some mechanism to back up any databases / locally created files to your home machine).

If you're really just looking for something dirt cheap for personal projects that won't see use beyond yourself, the free / up to $5/mo tier of the big cloud providers is a reasonable thing to check out. https://vncoupon.com/5-usd-vps-compare-linode-vs-vultr-vs-di... is a bit old now, maybe there's a newer article helping you sort that out.

[+] chatmasta|6 years ago|reply
Also look at webhostingtalk.com (that’s where all the BHW vendors are buying from anyway)
[+] balkierode|6 years ago|reply
Google cloud free tier gives everyone (not just students) one 'always' free vps instance. It works great for me.

Oracle promised 2 instances but got an error 'out of capacity' error instead. Support staff confirmed they dont have hardware in my region.

[+] ac29|6 years ago|reply
Just remember Google only gives you 1GB of egress network traffic free, per month. This might be enough for a small personal project, but even a low traffic website will easily surpass that - doing a Show HN or something will blow through that quickly.
[+] guitarsteve|6 years ago|reply
I was using that feature for the last year or so but recently they took away the public IP address. So I think it’s no longer free for common use cases like hosting a website. Correct me if I’m wrong!
[+] rumanator|6 years ago|reply
Hetzner.

They offer VMs with 1 vCPU and 2GB RAM for 3€/month. Quite a deal.

[+] ar-jan|6 years ago|reply
I second Hetzner. Their smallest VPS has been reliable for me and is even a bit cheaper than OVH. More importantly, should something go wrong or you have a question, you can expect a quite fast reply.
[+] mstolpm|6 years ago|reply
Recommending Hetzner Cloud as well. They had some connectivity problems 6-12 months ago, but seem very stable in the last months. They provide backup and snapshot features, floating IPs, internal networking and mountable volumes as well - which can be handy in comparison to a barebones server from e.g. Kimsufi where you have to manage everything yourself. Hetzners lowest tier is "much" cheaper than DO and co.
[+] kyriakos|6 years ago|reply
Decent uptime too. I have a vm running there with over 3 years of uptime. Not bad considering the price.
[+] wildduck|6 years ago|reply
And they have DDoS protection layer! With European data protection law better than US. It is a no brainer to pick Hetzner instead of any other services. They do have a difficult to remember name, maybe rebrand it for English speaking market.
[+] blfr|6 years ago|reply
OVH, Hetzner, and the whole Low End family

https://lowendstock.com/

https://www.lowendtalk.com/

https://lowendbox.com/

But nowadays you can get servers for free. AWS, Google, and even Oracle have free triers:

https://aws.amazon.com/free/

https://cloud.google.com/free/

https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/

[+] mstolpm|6 years ago|reply
IIRC, at least the Amazon EC2 free tier is limited to the first 12 months. There was a point at which I got billed for the instance that was free before.
[+] tomcooks|6 years ago|reply
Lowendbox, lurk 3+ years offers during blackfriday and you'll pay 1-5 dollars/year for a 2gb ram VPS with unlimited traffic in a non 13-eyes country. Payable in bitcoin.
[+] nickjj|6 years ago|reply
I use digitalocean.

Not because they are cheap but because they are great. It just so happens they have a $5 / month plan for a 1 CPU core / 1GB of memory / 25GB SSD server.

[+] jppope|6 years ago|reply
agreed. I also use AWS for certain projects... IMO- Don't put all your eggs in one basket
[+] _bxg1|6 years ago|reply
Heroku is free if you don't need constant uptime (it shuts down your server when it's idle for a while and starts it back up when a request comes in). Then the cheapest paid tier is $7.

It's also really pleasant because you deploy by just pushing your code; no SSHing or cron jobs. You do code an entire server process; you just don't manage it. So it's like halfway-serverless.

The downside, other than being $7 instead of $5, is that that's only for a single process; you can't run multiple low-compute servers within that $7. The file system also gets wiped whenever you deploy, so it's not appropriate for a database.

[+] lordnacho|6 years ago|reply
Just get a Hetzner. Costs very little, good exercise to set it up with a usable config. I even have one that I barely ever use.
[+] kylec|6 years ago|reply
You can find cheaper options than Linode, but honestly you can host lots of stuff on a single $5/month instance, and you get the benefit of their infrastructure and support. I remember being a student and paying $20/month for a SliceHost VPS with a fraction of what you can get today for much less.
[+] eldavido|6 years ago|reply
Had an account on asmallorange (https://asmallorange.com) for a while. Can't vouch for their compute power, but if barebones shell access is what you're after, they do well.
[+] mateioprea|6 years ago|reply
I'm using scaleway.com. For $3/month you get 2vcpus, 2GB RAM and 20GB ssd.
[+] rumanator|6 years ago|reply
I've tried Scaleway once when I applied for their 500€ 1-month credit campaign, but they demanded a CC and to add insult to injury charged me an activation charge that wasn't given back. Twice.

Can't say I recommend them.

[+] Havoc|6 years ago|reply
LowEndTalk offers

Very cheap but don't be surprised if a supplier goes out of business/disappears so strategize accordingly.

Plus then of course all the major cloud provide a intro credit. So that should cover about 3 years worth of basic VPS

[+] peterwwillis|6 years ago|reply
I love the lowendbox/lowendtalk forums. Dig in and you learn all kinds of inside information about the various discount hosting companies and their bizarre drama. You also learn how to spot actually reliable, professionally managed services, versus the fly by night people just looking to take your money and bail.
[+] _nalply|6 years ago|reply
Assuming the question is an XY problem and you are really looking for a very simple solution for an Internet server you operate: Have a look at FFTH.

If fiber is offered for your home then you can host your server in your bedroom. This is what I do for my websites, and this is really liberating. Hell, you could serve from a RaspberryPi or if you think this is too extreme, from a mini PC like Gigabyte Brix.

If fiber is not offered, but you plan to relocate anyway, try to optimize for FFTH. This is what I have done, I moved more than a year ago and specifically looked for FTTH.

[+] pera|6 years ago|reply
https://prgmr.com/

I have been using their VPSs for about 10 years: it's one of the best services I've ever had the pleasure to use.

[+] hmart|6 years ago|reply
I have my important VPSs on Linode since 2008, good experience, almost zero downtime in 10+ years, very reliable, great customer support. They have a $5/mo Nanode 1CPU, 1 GB Ram.