I can't wait for PaaS prices to drop. I know they'll always be relatively expensive, but I'm primarily a dev (not ops) and I don't have the time nor desire to manage my own servers securely.
Heroku lately has seemed a tempting offer, assuming I can run my apps on it (Rust based), but at $7/m for little side projects it felt.. expensive for a no user side project. They can add up. A $5/m DO box can host quite a few apps in containers, by comparison.
Perhaps Serverless would be a great playground for low/no traffic apps, but I've not gotten into serverless much.
I do CapRover + FaaS on the small $5 droplet on Linode. I run a lot of random stuff out of it, with the only change from me being increasing swap from 512MB to 2GB (it's all SSD backed anyways).
I don't see PaaS as a realistic alternative except for the simplest of apps. One always eventually needs to tweak the web server to get things like websockets, brotli compression, fast serving of versioned immutable files, or something else. Or run several servers with vpncloud.rs between them. It's not price that is a problem, it's the lack of flexibility.
I've been a Netcup customer for a year and a half or so, and I love them. Locations in Germany only, but for less than $10/mo (5.29EUR), you're not going to do much better than this on price to spec ratio. Performance is fantastic. I have the 8G/300G SAS rootserver for 8.99EUR (rootservers just give you dedicated cores). Note however that (similar to BuyVM), they are also extremely quick to cancel you outright if you don't pay in time.
There is (seems to be) no way to quickly spin up an instance for testing for new customers. After completing the order form I received an email stating they will check my address details and only after that complete the order and let me pay.
They're a provider I haven't heard of before. Following your link, what does "Billing period 6 Months" mean? Elsewhere on the page it says: "Hourly based billing. Tariff can be terminated at any time."
I would recommend staying away from OVH for anything important (e.g., a mail server). While the service is fairly reliable, when things do go wrong (like an IP network that you share with others get blacklisted because one of the IPs is part of a botnet), their support is useless. They do respond and are very polite, but nothing actually gets fixed and you eventually realize they are just wearing you down hoping that you give up.
OVH is pretty much useless for anything 'important'.
Worked with a company that had a large spend account with them as part of our VM/VPS offering which was built on top of leased bare metal where OVH was handling all our Roubaix VM/VPS. Without warning they capped every server to 10Mbps. Their explanation was not given to us individually but posted in french on their forums. We only knew what was going on because a francophone customer translated the message for us. We'd gotten lumped in with seedbox hosts and large CDN accounts.
The gist was they didn't want to cater to high bandwidth consumers, something they didn't evaluate as (# servers / BW usage) but by (account / BW usage).
They wouldn't even lift the bandwidth limit to transfer data off the servers. Not even for private traffic. 10Mbps ports for all of them. We had to offer our customers free service in another region or their data.... Choose one.... Just to try and limit the amount of data we moved off.
If they'd given us any warning we'd have been perfectly accepting of them not wanting our business. Whatever they're reasoning, it's a good reason to never consider them for anything mission critical every again.
A big caveat not mentioned for Digital Ocean is that they blackhole IPv6 email traffic. It took a while for me to figure out why it wasn't working since it wasn't documented in their documentation and there was no ICMPv6 response indicating this. Moved to Linode after that.
I wonder if the same caveat applies to other providers that have improperly implemented IPv6 by not providing a /64.
I don't agree with their policy, but it is difficult these days to run your own outbound mail service and not end up in the spam box.
I gave up and pay for Gsuite as an SMTP smarthost so my outbound email isn't tagged as spam. That allows me to still process the inbound on my server if I want.
Obviously doesn't help the privacy concern if that is your motivation for running your own SMTP.
If, however, cost is a consideration, Yandex is an option. They will host SMTP for your domain at no charge. https://yandex.com/support/connect/add-domain.html (assuming Russian hosting is okay for you)
My only gripe with DO is the stability for some of their regions. Some of them have been solid and only have minor outages, but others like one of the ones in AMS has had intermittent issues. For me their most attractive product is the DO spaces and is a quick drop in for S3.
But in all I like their servers and I go between the guides from DO and Linode to setup services that I’m unfamiliar with.
I've been running some live services on Hetzner Cloud (https://www.hetzner.com/cloud) and it's been very reliable. One server blip in ~1 year.
2Gb (20Gb storage, 20Tb transfer) from €2.49 - there are a few different DCs now so you can hedge your bets. The higher spec ones are great for Dockerizing a couple of postgresql backup servers.
Their VPS ('Cloud') offer is relatively new, with the dedicated and server auctions being their historical staple.
P.S. Very Euro centric, so probably not so good for Americas/AsiaPac
For those who want to lease ~anonymously with payment by Bitcoin:
BitHost OK cpu and ram OK uplink overpriced
CockBox OK cpu and ram slow uplink OK price
HostSailor OK cpu and ram fast uplink OK price
VPS.BG OK cpu and ram OK uplink OK price
I've used BuyVM for years and they are quite reliable. Though, I had one VPS terminated (including all data wiped) because I didn't pay the monthly invoice within 1 week of the due date. They have one of the most strict timelines on invoices I've ever seen for a web service:
4,2,4 - Unpaid services will be suspended four days past the due date on the service.
4,2,5 - Unpaid services will be terminated seven days past the due date on the service.
That said, the $15/year package is a super excellent deal for a basic VPS and I've never had any technical issues.
I've been using BuyVM for about six months, they're the only VPS provider I could find with anycast IP support which is a neat feature to have. I think they're a pretty small operation and in my experience, pretty much all of these low cost VPS providers will terminate if you go a few days overdue on the invoice.
I've been with them for my private mailserver VPS for ~7 years now and the support in IRC and via the ticketing system has always been fast and friendly. The author talks about the KVM/slice setup in the post but they're still dilligently running all the openvz from legacy contracts. You can count on them being around years from now.
I have had the same experience. Used them on and off for years and really like the service, especially for the cost. Just be sure to set a reminder to pay the invoice because they don’t do recurring billing (or at least didn’t last time I used them), and is you don’t pay your stuff is terminated.
Have used DO, Linode and Vultr (and some others) for 5+ years but Vultr is the only one that keeps having network problems every now and then.
I run "monit" on all instances that checks for connectivity every minute but maybe every few months or so, I get alerts of network reachability for a slight moment from Vultr instance located in Silicon valley region. It's cool that they accept Bitcoin for payment though.
The page's test of course doesn't test reliability over the years and it seems it's not done 10 times on different instances, and the performance could've randomly fluctuated on the test, so I'd take the results with a grain of salt.
DO has been pretty stable for me. It just keeps running with no interferance.
Linode sometimes (like once a year) makes your instance unavailable for a tiny moment for maintenance but they provide you with clear explanation beforehand and I think it's good that they actively patch security problems that way.
Also good that they pool bandwidth from multiple instances, so even if your small instance takes lots of bandwidth, if you got some other instances, it can consume the limit from those too as a single pool.
Another for Linode is that they release OS images so fast as in they had CentOS 8 image the day I read the news it was released. I checked the others but only Linode had it then.
I have been happy with binarylane hosted in Sydney.
I tried vultr ~2 years ago and at least then they did not have their own ubuntu repository mirror. All the package manager downloads were painfully slow. Digital Ocean and binarylane mirror the repo and any package can be pulled pretty much instantly and it makes the initial setup much more pleasant.
+1 for Vultr. Not in NZ but we've been using them for various app / database servers for coming on four years now and we have literally only ever had one minor issue. Their support is through ticketing only (AFAIK), but their support team is very fast at responding.
Just switched jacobsparts.com over from ec2 to vultr. Cheaper by the hour than a 3yr reserved instance on aws, none of the nickel and dime billing and the cpu is sooooo much better, cutting ~250ms off the response time. Had an unplanned reboot today. Got an email from support and then it went down for about 20 seconds. Overall there is tremendous value in the smaller hosts, and I loved the article; though doubt some of the hosts reviewed will be around for long.
Another important "potential pro" metric is how fast can you reset a server to a blank state without having to flat out destroy + create a new one.
This is super handy for testing configuration management tools.
With DigitalOcean they have a rebuild option where you can take an existing server and rebuild it with a new image. It takes like 10 seconds to wipe your server clean in 1 button press and you always get the same IP address. You also don't get charged for a new server since you're still using the original one.
It makes testing something like Ansible really pleasant because you can iterate so quickly. I know you can always test things in a local VM (and I do for most of it) but there are subtle differences in DO's base image vs a stock or bento vagrant box of ubuntu / debian.
I've been using Vultr for almost 3 years now. They had some problems with 1-3 server reboots a year, and I once had some trouble with IPv6 setup. The support was quite helpful, but they ended up moving my instance to a different host node.
They take Bitcoin (verification needed) too.
I received a good amount of credits for finding a security vuln in their CP (not severer), and prices are quite good to begin with. If anyone plans to use them, I recommend the High Freq line. Snapshots are currently free. Additional IPv4 and /64 IPv6 cost $3/mo. Network-level firewall and fast DNS (although NS in same /30, anycasted) is for free.
Block storage is reasonable and is on par with Digital Ocean, and is fast. I have 50GB $0/mo instance as an early customer.
If the person who did the testing reads this, thank you for sharing that information. I think it's important to know which providers are good hosting options for smaller companies and personal projects without providing a bad, unreliable or even shady service.
> I'm surprised that smaller companies have not moved away from static pricing yet.
The physical server has a fixed set of resources. If you let customers pick what resource they want to buy, you'll run out of one resource before the rest, leaving the server underutilized and increasing your costs. You can't sell KVM instances with no ram, no disk, or no CPU.
If you have enough physical servers and small enough customers, you can mostly solve this by carefully figuring out which customers to put on which machines. However, you've created a complicated jigsaw puzzle. And what happens if you need to shift customers between servers to balance things out?
I think Google is able to offer custom machine types because they're big enough, and because they're able to perform live migrations between physical hosts (most hosting providers can't do this), so the customer likely won't even notice if they need to be migrated.
Instead, most of these providers offer a few different SKUs to satisfy different use-cases, or they just pick one target market (e.g. lots of disk space for backups or lots of CPU resource for compute) and focus on that. A few offer networked block storage, which gives some more flexibility, but at the (potential) cost of reliability and performance.
> None in Asia though? You need it to be in Taiwan to service the region well!
There is https://www.serverhunter.com/ but really reviews like this are better because metrics like CPU-core and instantaneous disk speeds won't necessarily tell you about the consistency in network, disk, and CPU performance over a long period, and the supported features. It is not like AWS and Google Cloud where you can expect stable performance.
I'm replying to myself because I just managed to get a IONOS instance running in Kansas City (same distance from east/west-coasts) for low-and-behold 1€/month with unlimited data (18GB SSD and 512MB RAM). How is AWS/GCE going to compete with that?
One gotcha is that if you come from the EU you need to register via ionos.eu and there is a registration fee of 10€ for each instance!
Also looking at VPS in china now, Shanghai is pretty well placed in the Asia region: Edit: VPS is crazy expensive in China (10x-30x more expensive than IONOS and that is without data which also is 20x more expensive!), I suggest using AWS as backup to GCE over there, probably want to stay outside of the firewall in Asia if you use port 80, atleast if your other Asian customers are more important than your China customers to begin with.
Something is off with the prices globally right now, the US is like on a permanent firesale when it comes to non essential goods, but to live there is impossible!?
Happy to see Lunanode rated Really Good. My exact experience during more than three years as a completely happy customer. They don't stock any Alpine Linux, but fetching the install image and setting up is a breeze, and not once, ever, have I had an issue with any of my instances. And highly appreciated: I can clone an instance, download the qcow2 image, fiddle with it locally, upload, and put it back in production. Flexible, easy, clean, no nonsense, reliable, cheap, and absolutely recommended.
Don't know about support, though, since so far I have had no cause to call them.
chuckled a little when reading the first negative of luna was the absence of having a debian 10 template. i raised a ticket with them about this in july, and have been periodically testing new openstack releases from https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/openstack/current-10/ to see if the issue 'fixed itself' for some reason with debian 10, cloud-init takes around 6 min to raise network interfaces, which is why they haven't released a template yet. not sure if the issue is on lunas side or not.
[+] [-] n1vz3r|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asdkhadsj|6 years ago|reply
Heroku lately has seemed a tempting offer, assuming I can run my apps on it (Rust based), but at $7/m for little side projects it felt.. expensive for a no user side project. They can add up. A $5/m DO box can host quite a few apps in containers, by comparison.
Perhaps Serverless would be a great playground for low/no traffic apps, but I've not gotten into serverless much.
[+] [-] thesandlord|6 years ago|reply
https://cloud.google.com/run
My side projects all run for free.
(I work for Google Cloud)
[+] [-] fastball|6 years ago|reply
[0] https://github.com/dokku/dokku
[+] [-] WrtCdEvrydy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rcarmo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tyingq|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jwr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vidar|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iagovar|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] indigodaddy|6 years ago|reply
https://www.netcup.eu/bestellen/produkt.php?produkt=2006
[+] [-] mylonov|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] porker|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boris|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] voidwtf|6 years ago|reply
Worked with a company that had a large spend account with them as part of our VM/VPS offering which was built on top of leased bare metal where OVH was handling all our Roubaix VM/VPS. Without warning they capped every server to 10Mbps. Their explanation was not given to us individually but posted in french on their forums. We only knew what was going on because a francophone customer translated the message for us. We'd gotten lumped in with seedbox hosts and large CDN accounts.
The gist was they didn't want to cater to high bandwidth consumers, something they didn't evaluate as (# servers / BW usage) but by (account / BW usage).
They wouldn't even lift the bandwidth limit to transfer data off the servers. Not even for private traffic. 10Mbps ports for all of them. We had to offer our customers free service in another region or their data.... Choose one.... Just to try and limit the amount of data we moved off.
If they'd given us any warning we'd have been perfectly accepting of them not wanting our business. Whatever they're reasoning, it's a good reason to never consider them for anything mission critical every again.
[+] [-] tyingq|6 years ago|reply
In the situation you describe, for example, it's not hard to add a new IP address in their admin panel and update DNS.
[+] [-] tambre|6 years ago|reply
I wonder if the same caveat applies to other providers that have improperly implemented IPv6 by not providing a /64.
[+] [-] tyingq|6 years ago|reply
I gave up and pay for Gsuite as an SMTP smarthost so my outbound email isn't tagged as spam. That allows me to still process the inbound on my server if I want.
Obviously doesn't help the privacy concern if that is your motivation for running your own SMTP.
If, however, cost is a consideration, Yandex is an option. They will host SMTP for your domain at no charge. https://yandex.com/support/connect/add-domain.html (assuming Russian hosting is okay for you)
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] benbristow|6 years ago|reply
Excellent uptime and very good connectivity, great interface and the pricing is very fair. Even moved a client to them with no real issues.
Would definitely recommend for a developer looking to get themselves online with a limited budget.
[+] [-] skunkworker|6 years ago|reply
But in all I like their servers and I go between the guides from DO and Linode to setup services that I’m unfamiliar with.
[+] [-] justkez|6 years ago|reply
2Gb (20Gb storage, 20Tb transfer) from €2.49 - there are a few different DCs now so you can hedge your bets. The higher spec ones are great for Dockerizing a couple of postgresql backup servers.
Their VPS ('Cloud') offer is relatively new, with the dedicated and server auctions being their historical staple.
P.S. Very Euro centric, so probably not so good for Americas/AsiaPac
[+] [-] Havoc|6 years ago|reply
https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/161957/psa-a-bunch-of-...
Be careful out there guys
[+] [-] mirimir|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amatecha|6 years ago|reply
4,2,4 - Unpaid services will be suspended four days past the due date on the service.
4,2,5 - Unpaid services will be terminated seven days past the due date on the service.
That said, the $15/year package is a super excellent deal for a basic VPS and I've never had any technical issues.
[+] [-] 0x0000000|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Hamuko|6 years ago|reply
Also, how is that block storage so much cheaper than anyone else's?
[+] [-] superkuh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] filmgirlcw|6 years ago|reply
Great team tho and always very receptive in IRC.
[+] [-] amanzi|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mekster|6 years ago|reply
I run "monit" on all instances that checks for connectivity every minute but maybe every few months or so, I get alerts of network reachability for a slight moment from Vultr instance located in Silicon valley region. It's cool that they accept Bitcoin for payment though.
The page's test of course doesn't test reliability over the years and it seems it's not done 10 times on different instances, and the performance could've randomly fluctuated on the test, so I'd take the results with a grain of salt.
DO has been pretty stable for me. It just keeps running with no interferance.
Linode sometimes (like once a year) makes your instance unavailable for a tiny moment for maintenance but they provide you with clear explanation beforehand and I think it's good that they actively patch security problems that way.
Also good that they pool bandwidth from multiple instances, so even if your small instance takes lots of bandwidth, if you got some other instances, it can consume the limit from those too as a single pool.
Another for Linode is that they release OS images so fast as in they had CentOS 8 image the day I read the news it was released. I checked the others but only Linode had it then.
[+] [-] climb_stealth|6 years ago|reply
I tried vultr ~2 years ago and at least then they did not have their own ubuntu repository mirror. All the package manager downloads were painfully slow. Digital Ocean and binarylane mirror the repo and any package can be pulled pretty much instantly and it makes the initial setup much more pleasant.
[+] [-] jonny383|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] berkut|6 years ago|reply
AWS is available (with Lightsail as well) in Sydney as well (albeit with reduced bandwidth compared to other regions for the pricing).
[+] [-] zhte415|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacob019|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] juskrey|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickjj|6 years ago|reply
This is super handy for testing configuration management tools.
With DigitalOcean they have a rebuild option where you can take an existing server and rebuild it with a new image. It takes like 10 seconds to wipe your server clean in 1 button press and you always get the same IP address. You also don't get charged for a new server since you're still using the original one.
It makes testing something like Ansible really pleasant because you can iterate so quickly. I know you can always test things in a local VM (and I do for most of it) but there are subtle differences in DO's base image vs a stock or bento vagrant box of ubuntu / debian.
[+] [-] Ayesh|6 years ago|reply
They take Bitcoin (verification needed) too.
I received a good amount of credits for finding a security vuln in their CP (not severer), and prices are quite good to begin with. If anyone plans to use them, I recommend the High Freq line. Snapshots are currently free. Additional IPv4 and /64 IPv6 cost $3/mo. Network-level firewall and fast DNS (although NS in same /30, anycasted) is for free.
Block storage is reasonable and is on par with Digital Ocean, and is fast. I have 50GB $0/mo instance as an early customer.
[+] [-] wvh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bullen|6 years ago|reply
We need to introduce a common way of comparing these say: GHz CPU-core day, MB RAM day, MB SSD WRITE, GB SSD READ / NET?
Like this works now you're always comparing apples and oranges and maybe that is the way Amazon and Google (both on KVM now!) wants it?
Few small operators in Dallas, Kansas and Nuremberg are well placed for latency sensitive activity:
- vpsdime (7$)
- 1&1 IONOS (2$)
- Hetzner (3$) & Contabo (6$)
I'm going to try IONOS because they also have a center in Germany!
None in Asia though? You need it to be in Taiwan to service the region well!
Only found yardvps.com (6$) in Taipei and they limit bandwidth to 100GB (2000GB for same price in Dallas).
[+] [-] bgwhn|6 years ago|reply
The physical server has a fixed set of resources. If you let customers pick what resource they want to buy, you'll run out of one resource before the rest, leaving the server underutilized and increasing your costs. You can't sell KVM instances with no ram, no disk, or no CPU.
If you have enough physical servers and small enough customers, you can mostly solve this by carefully figuring out which customers to put on which machines. However, you've created a complicated jigsaw puzzle. And what happens if you need to shift customers between servers to balance things out?
I think Google is able to offer custom machine types because they're big enough, and because they're able to perform live migrations between physical hosts (most hosting providers can't do this), so the customer likely won't even notice if they need to be migrated.
Instead, most of these providers offer a few different SKUs to satisfy different use-cases, or they just pick one target market (e.g. lots of disk space for backups or lots of CPU resource for compute) and focus on that. A few offer networked block storage, which gives some more flexibility, but at the (potential) cost of reliability and performance.
> None in Asia though? You need it to be in Taiwan to service the region well!
Bandwidth in Asia is significantly more expensive (https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-costs-around-the-world...), so most budget hosting providers stay away.
[+] [-] perennate|6 years ago|reply
There is also https://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/ which conducts regular tests and may give a more complete picture.
[+] [-] bullen|6 years ago|reply
One gotcha is that if you come from the EU you need to register via ionos.eu and there is a registration fee of 10€ for each instance!
Also looking at VPS in china now, Shanghai is pretty well placed in the Asia region: Edit: VPS is crazy expensive in China (10x-30x more expensive than IONOS and that is without data which also is 20x more expensive!), I suggest using AWS as backup to GCE over there, probably want to stay outside of the firewall in Asia if you use port 80, atleast if your other Asian customers are more important than your China customers to begin with.
Something is off with the prices globally right now, the US is like on a permanent firesale when it comes to non essential goods, but to live there is impossible!?
[+] [-] interfixus|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adar|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zjra|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 627467|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gigatexal|6 years ago|reply