[fbcpck]

I am actually not familiar with such limitations with storage VPS against webservers. It doesn't seem to be the norm, and I would still search with "Storage VPS" as search keyword in e.g. https://lowendtalk.com.

I've personally used the following in the past. It was quite cheap and generally happy with it.

https://www.time4vps.com/storage-vps/

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You might also want to get (snipe) a server off https://www.kimsufi.com/uk/servers.xml — the best ones usually sold out within a minute or two, but nothing beats the price.

[midasz]

Really easy to use changedetection.io to snipe one of these. Did it a few weeks ago, they become available rather often but indeed disappear within a couple of minutes.

[KronisLV]

Also a fellow customer of Time4VPS and this is perhaps one of the few times I've seen them mentioned on HackerNews.

That said, with their Storage VPS offerings the OSes that they offer may or may not be suitable for your needs: https://www.time4vps.com/knowledgebase/what-os-do-you-offer/...

Personally I'd suggest that you do not publicly expose such an OS but rather have it act as a NFS mount for another VPS with a newer OS release.

Also, while they offer backups (with restoring them being a manual and paid process), no such option is available for the Storage VPS offering, you can see that much being stated in the FAQ at the bottom of the page.

Once again, I rather enjoy their services and they're a relatively local company so I'm glad to support them, but at the same time Hetzner is pretty much on par with what they offer, with time based billing (instead of per month) and a nice UI: https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box (though I had to verify my ID when I signed up with them, which was inconvenient and actually had my attempt be denied a few years ago until recently when it worked, not sure what that was about)

Furthermore, you might also look at the offerings by Contabo, though their performance isn't exactly excellent and there are setup fees and their UI looks antiquated (but the service itself is okay): https://contabo.com/en/storage-vps/

I think most options out there will have certain drawbacks, since for whatever reason the status quo is to have smaller packages so whatever backing resources the servers have can probably be split up nicely amongst the customers' instances, thus making storage optimized VPSes something of a niche product.

Approx. price per the recommended setups (no public facing EOL distros) for 1TB of data, per month (divided when yearly billing applicable):

  Time4VPS (storage VPS + container VPS), new client, monthly: 3.99 EUR + 1.99 EUR = 5.98 EUR
  Time4VPS (storage VPS + container VPS), new client, yearly: 3.33 EUR + 1.66 EUR = 4.99 EUR
  Time4VPS (storage VPS + container VPS), regular prices, monthly: 7.99 EUR + 3.99 EUR = 11.98 EUR
  Time4VPS (storage VPS + container VPS), regular prices, yearly: 6.66 EUR + 3.33 EUR = 9.99 EUR
  Hetzner (storage space + VPS): 3.45 EUR + 4.15 EUR = 7.6 EUR
  Contabo (300 GB + 700 GB storage VPS): 3.99 EUR + 7.99 EUR = 11.98 EUR
  Contabo (1400 GB storage VPS): 12.99 EUR

Out of curiosity, here's an example of what it might cost with block storage offerings:

  Hetzner (block storage + VPS): 48.74 EUR + 4.15 EUR = 52.89 EUR
  DigitalOcean (block storage + VPS): 96.26 EUR + 4.81 EUR = 101.07 EUR
  Vultr (block storage + VPS): 96.26 EUR + 5.78 EUR = 102.04 EUR
  Scaleway (block storage + Stardust VPS): 58.40 EUR + 1.82 EUR = 60.22 EUR

(figures might be inaccurate because of VAT, just an example of the ballpark that we're in)