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Ask HN: Where do you get your cheap servers?
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.
- pnutjam 7y agoTime4vps has some of the best prices I can find for storage. I've been using one for a could years with no problems. Virmach seems to have comparable prices, but I haven't used them.
- wensheng 7y agoAWS EC2 reserved instances, pay upfront for 3 years, it works out cheaper than digitalocean/linode.
- core-questions 7y agoIt'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-digitalocean-vs-amazon-lightsail/ 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 7y agoAlso look at webhostingtalk.com (that’s where all the BHW vendors are buying from anyway)
- Havoc 7y agoLowEndTalk 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 7y agoI 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.
- Palomides 7y agoAWS, azure, and digitalocean all give free credit to students https://education.github.com/pack https://education.github.com/pack vultr, hetzner, and OVH have sub-$5/month VPS plans Personally, I use digitalocean.
- xeeeeeeeeeeenu 7y agoOVH, Hetzner, Digital Ocean
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- segmondy 7y agoIf you're looking for really cheap, then use the free servers. Google, AWS provide free tiers that are more than enough for a hobbyist.
- joe_bleau 7y agoSounds crazy, but the Orcale free tier might work for you. Enough to run two small Linux VPS instances free.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- marvel_boy 7y agoDo you mean Oracle Cloud?
- tim333 7y agoI think this thing https://docs.cloud.oracle.com/iaas/Content/FreeTier/resourceref.htm https://docs.cloud.oracle.com/iaas/Content/FreeTier/resource... some forum discussion https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/160260/oracle-cloud-free-tier https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/160260/oracle-cloud-fr... seems ok though slowish I/O
- Havoc 7y agoFaster io than the free GCP
- pera 7y agohttps://prgmr.com/ 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.
- kylec 7y agoYou 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 7y agoHad an account on asmallorange (https://asmallorange.com 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.
- gregoryca 7y agoA Small Orange was acquired by EIG (Endurance International Group) in 2012[1] and has reportedly gone downhill since[2]. [1] https://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.net/blog/site-updates-news/the-who-what-when-of-endurance-international-group-eig/ https://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.net/blog/site-updates-n... [2] https://reviewsignal.com/blog/2016/01/19/the-rise-and-fall-of-a-small-orange/ https://reviewsignal.com/blog/2016/01/19/the-rise-and-fall-o...
- tomcooks 7y agoLowendbox, 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.
- throwaway_bad 7y agoTake advantage of student credits! Even when you run out of credits, all cloud providers have a pretty generous free tier. For example see haveibeenpwn.com's cost breakdown for running a hugely popular api for less than a dollar a month: https://www.troyhunt.com/serverless-to-the-max-doing-big-things-for-small-dollars-with-cloudflare-workers-and-azure-functions/ https://www.troyhunt.com/serverless-to-the-max-doing-big-thi...
- balkierode 7y agoGoogle 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.
- guitarsteve 7y agoI 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!
- ac29 7y agoJust 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.
- rcarmo 7y agoPut CloudFlare in front. Works fine for me.
- rumanator 7y agoHetzner. They offer VMs with 1 vCPU and 2GB RAM for 3€/month. Quite a deal.
- kyriakos 7y agoDecent uptime too. I have a vm running there with over 3 years of uptime. Not bad considering the price.
- ar-jan 7y agoI 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 7y agoRecommending 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.
- wildduck 7y agoAnd 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.
- lordnacho 7y agoJust 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.
- nickjj 7y agoI 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 7y agoagreed. I also use AWS for certain projects... IMO- Don't put all your eggs in one basket
- Stevvo 7y agoOVH, their cheapest brand is Kimsufi. From five euros a month. i.e. your own box for the price of a VPN.
- mateioprea 7y agoI'm using scaleway.com. For $3/month you get 2vcpus, 2GB RAM and 20GB ssd.
- 1337shadow 7y agoAnd great unmetered bandwidth
- rumanator 7y agoI'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.
- speedypete 7y agoscaleway.com and hetzner.com
- peterwwillis 7y agoFor websites, just use GitHub Pages. It's totally free, very reliable, and extremely easy. It feels like a nerdier GeoCities, but without the composing tools.
- hmart 7y agoI 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.
- shpx 7y agoThere 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-lightsail-linode-upcloud-vultr/ 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/ 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.
- 52-6F-62 7y agoYep. 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.
- pnutjam 7y agoFor cheap hosting, nearlyfreespeech.net is where it's at, cheap and full shell access on bad.
- vinni2 7y agoMany cloud providers like digital ocean have student offers [1] with GitHub student developer program worth trying out. [1] https://blog.digitalocean.com/were-participating-in-githubs-student-developer-program/ https://blog.digitalocean.com/were-participating-in-githubs-...
- bennofs 7y agoActually, 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.
- daemonk 7y agoHetzner is great. Cheap for what you get.
- DizzyDoo 7y agoI've been on Digital Ocean for a few years, pretty happy with them and have no plans to move on. I was on Hetzner before them, but moved away because the pricing was essentially the same yet Hetzner's control panel (at least back then - I'm talking before 2015) was a bit of a pain, and DO's is all shiny, and I find what I'm looking for quickly, most of the time. Hetzner's admin panel might have come a long way since then though?
- ignoramous 7y agoVultr: 1 vCPU / 512MB RAM / 500 GB bandwidth for $2.5 a month [0]. I ran a VPN with them, once. https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud-compute/ https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud-compute/ For webpages, I have been using https://1mb.site https://1mb.site (free custom domain and TLS) and https://netlify.com https://netlify.com
- werber 7y agoAlso check to see what free stuff you can get through your school!
- rtomanek 7y agoLinode. Cheap but not too cheap, still reliable.
- ja27 7y agoMy choice too. Been pretty reliable and perform well. Easy to find a $20 credit for new customers on podcasts and other ads.
- arkh 7y agoIn France: OVH. Their kimsufi lineup is hard to beat.
- _bxg1 7y agoHeroku 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.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 7y agoNow, you are asking for subscription-based, but have you considered that it is perfectly possible to host on your own hardware at home perfectly fine for experimental/personal stuff? Just buy the cheapest Raspberry Pi (or a clone or whatever) and hook it up at home, that's certainly going to be cheaper than any of the cloud providers being thrown around here, only the cheapest lowendtalk offers might be cheaper still.
- blfr 7y agoOVH, Hetzner, and the whole Low End family https://lowendstock.com/ https://lowendstock.com/ https://www.lowendtalk.com/ https://www.lowendtalk.com/ https://lowendbox.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://aws.amazon.com/free/ https://cloud.google.com/free/ https://cloud.google.com/free/ https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/ https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/
- mstolpm 7y agoIIRC, 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.
- darksaints 7y agoI know you aren't interested in server hardware, but you should be. You can get extremely cheap used servers from eBay, Craigslist, or government auctions, and you can get extremely cheap rackspace in colocation centers.
- detaro 7y agoThat's unlikely to be "cheap" compared to what a student needs for the first few experiments.
- darksaints 7y agoThat would depend entirely on the nature of the experiments.
- breakerbox 7y agoGreat experience with Amazon Lightsail. The smallest instance is only $3.50 a month, and you can add a swap file if you need a bit more than 512 MB of RAM. Lightsail is like swimming in the shallow end of the AWS pool. Doesn’t have a drop down with 50 services like AWS, but has enough to run a small or medium sized web app.
- _nalply 7y agoAssuming 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.
- xcircle 7y agoI use netcup.eu , a German Provider. They have cheap hour based plans so that you can cancel your plan everytime.
- craftoman 7y agoBelow the cheapest and most reliable VPS providers. Europe => Hetzner, Scaleway USA => Digital Ocean, Vultr, Linode
- anonthrowaway28 7y agoVPS: - https://bytemark.co.uk https://bytemark.co.uk (VPS, colo and leased physical by competent & responsive folks (in Manchester IIRC)) - https://linode.com https://linode.com (more than just Linux) - https://pair.com https://pair.com (24/7 phone support in North America, has FreeBSD offerings too, been in business a long time) Bonus: And physical servers: https://unixsurplus.com https://unixsurplus.com
- TrAnn3l 7y agoNetcup, very cheap and reliable https://www.netcup.de https://www.netcup.de
- sv12l 7y agoThere are many options mentioned already and one I haven't seen so far is https://www.ssdnodes.com/ https://www.ssdnodes.com/ been using it for some time, fares well.