25 ms·

Low-Cost VPS Testing

296 points by Cyberdog 7y ago

juskrey 7y ago
Well, nowadays all of them are just fine when you install OS and run several tests. Problems handling is what really matters.
asdkhadsj 7y ago
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.
- tyingq 7y ago
  Maybe openfaas, kubeless, or knative on DigitalOcean's managed K8S? Note that Linode has managed K8S in beta now, so there's another cheap K8S option.
  - Hamuko 7y ago
    Isn't that even more expensive? DO advertises it as "as little as $10 per month".
    - tyingq 7y ago
      Ah, I had assumed you could run one node.
      - OJFord 7y ago
        If it's like AWS' equivalent, you can, but the cost is more than that because you're paying for a managed control plane.
        tyingq 7y ago
        I had assumed it was like Linode: "Linode Kubernetes Pricing LKE pricing includes only the resources you consume – Linodes, NodeBalancers, and Volumes. Your cluster’s master services are free of charge." So whenever they are out of their beta, you should be able to run a $5/month single node K8S "cluster".
  - erulabs 7y ago
    If you’re interested - Im building a starting-at-free Kubernetes hosting service, out of YCombinator S19! - https://kubesail.com https://kubesail.com
- rcarmo 7y ago
  If you feel like contributing Rust support to https://github.com/piku https://github.com/piku, it would be great. ;)
- fastball 7y ago
  Have you tried running Dokku[0] on a VPS? [0] https://github.com/dokku/dokku https://github.com/dokku/dokku
  - wooly_bully 7y ago
    Seconding this. Big fan of Dokku on a DO droplet as an inexpensive way to make applications.
    - MuffinFlavored 7y ago
      I feel like setting up Docker + Terraform might be easier? Postgres + Redis + containerized app with little effort.
  - asdkhadsj 7y ago
    No, but that's mainly because I still have to manage the server running Dokku I believe? edit: For context what I was already using was manual docker on a DO box. While I recognized that Dokku would make it more seamless and easier, my issue was managing and securing the DO VM itself. I didn't see how Dokku would help that scenario
    - itake 7y ago
      yep. Dokku is not as simple as heroku.
      - benbristow 7y ago
        It's definitely not as simple as you have to maintain the server yourself. But being able to run multiple applications/containers on a server for the price of one dyno really makes up for it for personal projects! If I were working on a project with a corporate budget then using Heroku or a different style of architecture like serverless would be a no-brainer
    - ivoecpereira 7y ago
      I would suggest reading about Ansible and working on an initial collection of Ansible playbooks that might help on that. Check out https://www.thecloud.coach/ansible-crash-course https://www.thecloud.coach/ansible-crash-course. Of course nothing beats a dedicated devops but some playbooks regarding main security compliances might do a great job. Anyone correct me if I am wrong but I am seeing it as a good base practice for these cases.
- thesandlord 7y ago
  Give Google Cloud Run a try. Can run any Docker container, and billing is per request. It is basically a fully managed knative. https://cloud.google.com/run https://cloud.google.com/run My side projects all run for free. (I work for Google Cloud)
  - asdkhadsj 7y ago
    That.. is really impressive! Had no idea about this, thanks! For a well rounded review, can you or anyone comment on similar offerings with competitors? I was not familiar with per-request containers, but it sounds like exactly what I wanted. Thoughts?
    - arcticfox 7y ago
      I've been trying every Docker platform for years (Joyrnt Triton, Tutum, k8s on various platforms)... Cloud Run is by far my favorite
      - AtroxDev 7y ago
        I fully agree with this. I'm using Cloud Run since the day it got into beta and never been happier. It beats all the other platforms (for docker) IMO.
        ivoecpereira 7y ago
        Out of curiosity, what are you using for your databases?
        drewnick 7y ago
        Not OP but I can setup DB of choice on an instance or group of instances and access directly from the Cloud Run containers. Our particular main stack is on MongoDB 3.4 so we deployed Atlas on the VPC and the containers access it just fine.
- WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
  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).
- iagovar 7y ago
  Maybe scalingo.com or fortrabbit.com for php?
- vidar 7y ago
  render.com is a really strong PaaS, quite recent but showing great promise.
- jwr 7y ago
  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.
  - asdkhadsj 7y ago
    That may be true for some, but it's not true for me - currently. Ie, if I could get a DB/FS + PaaS for $5/m I'd use it in a heartbeat. If I run into a wall where I need to manually tweak some fine detail, I can always fall back to normal deployments, right? PaaS in concept fits exactly what many of us seek. Deploying apps without managing ops. Just because it's not infinitely powerful doesn't mean it's a reason no one would use a PaaS. PaaS fits a very real use case. In my somewhat edge case though, hobby/side projects, I can't pay much for them. So I manage the ops myself currently because I can save money, but if Heroku was just a bit more cheap I'd use them.
amatecha 7y ago
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.
- filmgirlcw 7y ago
  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. Great team tho and always very receptive in IRC.
- superkuh 7y ago
  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.
  - slipwalker 7y ago
    just wondering what is your setup for this mailserver ? Which OS, smtpd, IMAPd, etc...
    - superkuh 7y ago
      I followed the general outline of the ispmail tutorials at https://workaround.org/ispmail https://workaround.org/ispmail . Debian based, postfix, dovecot, mysql, postgray (spam mitigation), catchall for the entire domain and only access it from imap clients or ssh'ing in. Doing webmail seemed like too much work to keep things secure. I self signed all my certs since it's just for me and very easy to set up and maintain (unlike letsencrypt over the same time span).
benbristow 7y ago
Been using DigitalOcean for a while now with a Dokku setup and running multiple sites/apps on it. 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 7y ago
  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.
indigodaddy 7y ago
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. https://www.netcup.eu/bestellen/produkt.php?produkt=2006 https://www.netcup.eu/bestellen/produkt.php?produkt=2006
- porker 7y ago
  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."
  - olex 7y ago
    You pay for 6 months at a time. If you cancel, you get money back for however much you didn't use.
    - indigodaddy 7y ago
      Yep, and if you want to pay monthly, go for a rootserver, but for those the cheapest is the 8.99EUR one I originally referenced that I have.
- mylonov 7y ago
  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.
  - indigodaddy 7y ago
    Yes, you go thru the auth process, pay, and then they email you VM details after provisioning. Fairly standard. I don't think they claim to be very "cloudy," so yeah you're not going to get on-demand VM's you can just spin up like DO/Vultr. Perhaps they're hourly billing is confusing or misleading to lead you to think that. And it honestly really isn't hourly billing I don't think, unless they don't bill if you turn the VM off (never tested that).
Havoc 7y ago
If you're willing to take a chance on smaller operations you can get significantly more powerful stuff. e.g. I purchased a VPS with 3vcore and 4gig RAM at 6 USD a month during black friday
wvh 7y ago
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.
m_b 7y ago
Regarding Scaleway lack of rDNS for IPv6: it's because they don't support it. Customers (like I was) asked for it many times since 2016 but it seems too hard to implement for them.
- nieve 7y ago
  In my experience Scaleway isn't worth the risk. I had multiple weeks-long periods for different vpses (and both FreeBSD & Linux) over the course of two years where their network-mounted root disks would start throwing errors and then drop offline entirely. Worse, after one of these incidents their control panel usually wouldn't allow a reboot. I went round and round with support and the most they ever did was clear a flag for that and tell me they were experiencing network issues. I've also used Ramnode, Linode, Servercheap, Amazon, Heroku, various small local colo companies over, etc. and Scaleway was the only actively bad one. Unexpected outages, disk corruption, and usually not even a credit when I'd been up and down for days. If you have problems like that with your infrastructure and they crop up on and off for years, you need to bring in new people and invest in infrastructure. They aren't going to.
  - iseeyou 7y ago
    I have similar experience with Scaleway for the disks. I have been running a few cheap dedicated ARM/Atom servers there for many years. It seems be a tied to a specific host or model, I have one of the first arm's which has been dead stable, but I have seen disk issues with both my new Atom's and newer ARM's. I still use them for some non-critical stuff because their cheap dedicated ARM and Atom's give you isolation like a dedicated machine. In combination with a LUKS mount I like to think it's safer against any Meltdown/Rowhammer-like attacks than a shared instance. But if you want a stable VPS you might have better luck elsewhere.
- progval 7y ago
  IPv6 is a second-class citizen on Scaleway. eg. IPv4 addresses are independent resources that can be assigned to any server (or load balancer), IPv6 are tied to a specific server, and can't be moved to an other one. And their load balancer does not support IPv6.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
n1vz3r 7y ago
BTW author of the article is Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of PHP language (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf)
627467 7y ago
I have a contabo ssd vps with 8gb ram for ~5eur/month I'm quite happy for bango for buck
mirimir 7y ago
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 BitHost is a Digital Ocean reseller.
ignorantguy 7y ago
lowendbox has a lot of good options.
- bufferoverflow 7y ago
  LowEndBox indeed has great deals once in a while, but it's impossible to navigate. You can't search by specs. If you want a cheap VPS/dedicated server with certain specs, try https://www.serverhunter.com/ https://www.serverhunter.com/ And if you don't mind dealing with the russian UI, try https://poiskvps.ru/ https://poiskvps.ru/
- imPndy 7y ago
  i would not recommend to look for hosts there. Most (say 90%) of the hosts seen there are hosted on Colocrossing that actually owns both LowendBox and Lowendtalk (forum, thats mostly ran by volunteers) just today it turns out many of the hosts (20 and still increasing) posted there just suddenly decide to close shop, all at once, with the same email from all of them. This isnt even the first time this has happened, but it is on a larger scale. (you can read more about this on lowendtalk if interested)
jacob019 7y ago
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.
amanzi 7y ago
For those of us in NZ, there are only three providers on the list of "good" or "really good" that have a presence in Sydney: Vultr (https://www.vultr.com/ https://www.vultr.com/), Linode (https://www.linode.com https://www.linode.com), and VPS Server (https://www.vpsserver.com/ https://www.vpsserver.com/).
- berkut 7y ago
  I'm in NZ, and Vultr has been awesome for me, although no block storage in Sydney... AWS is available (with Lightsail as well) in Sydney as well (albeit with reduced bandwidth compared to other regions for the pricing).
- jonny383 7y ago
  +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.
  - amanzi 7y ago
    I've used Vultr for a few years now and am overall very happy. I just wish they'd bring their block storage offering to Sydney too.
    - jonny383 7y ago
      Can't +1 this enough!
- mekster 7y ago
  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.
bullen 7y ago
I'm surprised that smaller companies have not moved away from static pricing yet. 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).
- perennate 7y ago
  There is https://www.serverhunter.com/ 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. There is also https://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/ https://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/ which conducts regular tests and may give a more complete picture.
- pipeep 7y ago
  > 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! Bandwidth in Asia is significantly more expensive (https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-costs-around-the-world/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-costs-around-the-world...), so most budget hosting providers stay away.
exikyut 7y ago
Two related questions not answered in this article: - Where can I find good low-cost KVM with decent monthly bandwidth in Australia? Primarily want a remote fast Linux/VNC desktop (which will chew a lot of bandwidth), and want bandwidth left over to actually do things with. - There's no mention of Oracle's always-free cloud offerings (100GB disk, 1GB RAM, 10TB bandwidth). Interested to hear what people think of this.
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
  > Oracle's always-free cloud offerings (100GB disk, 1GB RAM, 10TB bandwidth). Interested to hear what people think of this. It's Oracle; wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole.
  - awill 7y ago
    hm.. I looked into this. I do agree to not touch Oracle, but free is free, right? What's the worst case? They turn it off or are unreliable?
    - Kwpolska 7y ago
      You try to install Java on your Oracle VPS, and some time later, you end up with a nastygram from their lawyers in your mailbox.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
      The worst case is probably that their "free" service has fine print that results in their lawyers handing you a large bill, probably by making it easy for you to accidentally use paid features. (Precedent: VirtualBox extensions)
- InvaderFizz 7y ago
  I'm quite happy with their free tier. I have two Ubuntu machines hosting various docker images. Network bandwidth seems capped at around 50mbps, but that is perfectly adequate for my needs. CPU is quite strong, it's two AMD Zen vCPUs. The compile times for a few of my containers was acceptable. Three downsides: -No reverse DNS (at least I couldn't get it to work) -No IPv6 -It's Oracle, I made sure I only used personal info and would never consider it for work purposes.
boris 7y ago
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.
- tyingq 7y ago
  I'm happy with OVH. But, I do agree that their support isn't always great. However, it's dirt cheap, so I adjust my expectations accordingly. In the situation you describe, for example, it's not hard to add a new IP address in their admin panel and update DNS.
- voidwtf 7y ago
  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.
interfixus 7y ago
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.
- zjra 7y ago
  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/ 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.
- adar 7y ago
  LunaNode has been great, I just wish they had even one US location or something that wasn't on OVH's network.
tambre 7y ago
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.
- tyingq 7y ago
  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 https://yandex.com/support/connect/add-domain.html (assuming Russian hosting is okay for you)
  - tambre 7y ago
    Been running my mail server on Linode for almost 2 years now. Fortunately I've yet to run in any issues. Having setup all the stuff properly from day 1 probably helps (TLS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, MTA-STS).
    - tyingq 7y ago
      Do you send a fair amount of email? Where I had trouble was running an ecom site. We set up all the things you mention correctly. We never sent any unsolicited email, but I assume people might occasionally flag a receipt or password reset as spam, and then it was game over for our email getting delivered. No issues since switching to gSuite.
      - tambre 7y ago
        Personal email server so I only send a small amount. Sometimes a few emails per day, some weeks only 1. Did the outgoing emails for the site ramp up fast? Did you only encounter issues with Gmail or with other big providers too?
fake-name 7y ago
This is one of those areas where if the company selling this sort of product isn't maintaining modules for their service in ansible/puppet/saltstack/etc...., they're really doing theirselves a disservice. I've had to fix the saltstack vultr integration multiple times when they break it. it's really annoying.
gigatexal 7y ago
DD is a terrible way to benchmark disks. You want to use fio like is done here: https://www.storagereview.com/node/3520 https://www.storagereview.com/node/3520
todotask 7y ago
For UpCloud referral, you still need to deposit 10USD to get on top of 25USD free (non-expiry date), it's overall a better deal.
cerberusss 7y ago
My preferred remote desktop tool is TeamViewer. Almost no VPS actually supports this, because TeamViewer needs a virtual graphics card (that's what I'm calling it, but I actually don't know what to call it). Linode used to provide one at 1024x768, but I think they no longer do so. Vultr however does support one, at 1280x1024. Anybody else have this preference for TeamViewer?
- Youden 7y ago
  Apparently TeamViewer supports headless Linux servers: https://www.teamviewer.com/en/remote-access-headless-linux/ https://www.teamviewer.com/en/remote-access-headless-linux/ I'm guessing what you're getting at here though is that you want to manage the server through a desktop interface, complete with windows and menus and the like. Most people don't do that on Linux servers because most of the things you need to interact with to administrate one are only accessible through a command line interface. That said, if you really want to manage a Linux server graphically, you might be able to make it work with something like Xvfb.
  - cerberusss 7y ago
    Yeah, I want a desktop. I manage my server via ssh of course, any extra graphical cruft is a liability there. > Xvfb I might, but I've tried a zillion things, and they all suck when you compare it to the ease of use that TeamViewer offers. What I also left out, is that I've already got the TeamViewer client running, because I remote into macOS and Windows.
    - Youden 7y ago
      Xvfb would give you the virtual desktop that the TeamViewer Server gives you access to. You'd still use the TeamViewer client to connect to it. Xvfb is just a way of running a graphical environment on a machine that doesn't otherwise have one.
      - cerberusss 7y ago
        That is... interesting. Is it maintained and packaged by the distros? It doesn't look like it. Duckduckgo gives me a bunch of old 2012-2013 results.
pnutjam 7y ago
I didn't see time4vps on here. They are the only provider I've seen with large storage vps's for a reasonable price. I use one to do all my cloud backups and I can still run afew services on top.
- prirun 7y ago
  Hmm... their largest storage VPS, 8TB, is $1437 USD/yr, which works out to around $15/mo/TB. This is 3x more expensive than Backblaze B2 @ $5/TB/mo. It seems like you'd do better using something like B2 for cloud backups and getting a $5/mo Linode VPS or $2.50/mo Vultr VPS for your other services. I use both Linode and Vultr and like them both.
  - pnutjam 7y ago
    I'm on 1tb, so it's a break even to use b2 and add another cheap vps. Plus I can use Borg.
vpskalasatama 7y ago
"Nobody" needs more than 300M/s IO bandwidth... It's the IOPS that matter..so this comparison is rubbish
nickjj 7y ago
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.
justkez 7y ago
I've been running some live services on Hetzner Cloud (https://www.hetzner.com/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
coleifer 7y ago
Why was Rasmus so concerned about reverse DNS? That's not something I'm very familiar with. Can anyone help explain?
- tyingq 7y ago
  Reverse DNS is what maps an IP address to a host name. A PTR-record type is used to store reverse DNS entries. The name of the PTR-record is the IP address with the segments in reverse order followed by ".in-addr.arpa". For example the reverse DNS entry for IP 2.3.4.5 would be stored as a PTR-record for "5.4.3.2.in-addr.arpa". That then points to "somehost.yourdomain.tld". It's important for things like email, where the receiver can do a reverse DNS lookup to make sure your host is supposed to be sending email from "example.domain". Lacking proper reverse DNS, your outgoing email could be marked as spam. Or rejected outright for one not existing. It's also used for some forms of SPF entries (though that's discouraged). Last, it's somewhat useful for logs if you have hosts in your domain that connect to each other. Though, usually, you're encouraged NOT to configure apache, syslogd, etc, to do reverse DNS lookups...for performance reasons.
Havoc 7y ago
Huge bunch of fly-by-night VPS shops shut down earlier today: https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/161957/psa-a-bunch-of-leb-hosts-deadpooling-arkahosting-supremevps-umaxhosting-hosting73-hostbrz-ku/p1 https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/161957/psa-a-bunch-of-... Be careful out there guys
drej 7y ago
I may have messed it up, but last time I tried Lightsail (being a loooong time user of Digital Ocean), I set up a CPU-intensive workload and it stalled within a short period of time. Then I found out the Lightsail instances are t-based ones, so I ran out of credits? So I guess it depends on the workload as well.
Ayesh 7y ago
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.

296 points by Cyberdog 7y ago

Well, nowadays all of them are just fine when you install OS and run several tests. Problems handling is what really matters.

asdkhadsj 7y ago

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.

tyingq 7y ago
Maybe openfaas, kubeless, or knative on DigitalOcean's managed K8S? Note that Linode has managed K8S in beta now, so there's another cheap K8S option.
- Hamuko 7y ago
  Isn't that even more expensive? DO advertises it as "as little as $10 per month".
  - tyingq 7y ago
    Ah, I had assumed you could run one node.
    - OJFord 7y ago
      If it's like AWS' equivalent, you can, but the cost is more than that because you're paying for a managed control plane.
      - tyingq 7y ago
        I had assumed it was like Linode: "Linode Kubernetes Pricing LKE pricing includes only the resources you consume – Linodes, NodeBalancers, and Volumes. Your cluster’s master services are free of charge." So whenever they are out of their beta, you should be able to run a $5/month single node K8S "cluster".
- erulabs 7y ago
  If you’re interested - Im building a starting-at-free Kubernetes hosting service, out of YCombinator S19! - https://kubesail.com https://kubesail.com
rcarmo 7y ago
If you feel like contributing Rust support to https://github.com/piku https://github.com/piku, it would be great. ;)
fastball 7y ago
Have you tried running Dokku[0] on a VPS? [0] https://github.com/dokku/dokku https://github.com/dokku/dokku
- wooly_bully 7y ago
  Seconding this. Big fan of Dokku on a DO droplet as an inexpensive way to make applications.
  - MuffinFlavored 7y ago
    I feel like setting up Docker + Terraform might be easier? Postgres + Redis + containerized app with little effort.
- asdkhadsj 7y ago
  No, but that's mainly because I still have to manage the server running Dokku I believe? edit: For context what I was already using was manual docker on a DO box. While I recognized that Dokku would make it more seamless and easier, my issue was managing and securing the DO VM itself. I didn't see how Dokku would help that scenario
  - itake 7y ago
    yep. Dokku is not as simple as heroku.
    - benbristow 7y ago
      It's definitely not as simple as you have to maintain the server yourself. But being able to run multiple applications/containers on a server for the price of one dyno really makes up for it for personal projects! If I were working on a project with a corporate budget then using Heroku or a different style of architecture like serverless would be a no-brainer
  - ivoecpereira 7y ago
    I would suggest reading about Ansible and working on an initial collection of Ansible playbooks that might help on that. Check out https://www.thecloud.coach/ansible-crash-course https://www.thecloud.coach/ansible-crash-course. Of course nothing beats a dedicated devops but some playbooks regarding main security compliances might do a great job. Anyone correct me if I am wrong but I am seeing it as a good base practice for these cases.
thesandlord 7y ago
Give Google Cloud Run a try. Can run any Docker container, and billing is per request. It is basically a fully managed knative. https://cloud.google.com/run https://cloud.google.com/run My side projects all run for free. (I work for Google Cloud)
- asdkhadsj 7y ago
  That.. is really impressive! Had no idea about this, thanks! For a well rounded review, can you or anyone comment on similar offerings with competitors? I was not familiar with per-request containers, but it sounds like exactly what I wanted. Thoughts?
  - arcticfox 7y ago
    I've been trying every Docker platform for years (Joyrnt Triton, Tutum, k8s on various platforms)... Cloud Run is by far my favorite
    - AtroxDev 7y ago
      I fully agree with this. I'm using Cloud Run since the day it got into beta and never been happier. It beats all the other platforms (for docker) IMO.
      - ivoecpereira 7y ago
        Out of curiosity, what are you using for your databases?
        drewnick 7y ago
        Not OP but I can setup DB of choice on an instance or group of instances and access directly from the Cloud Run containers. Our particular main stack is on MongoDB 3.4 so we deployed Atlas on the VPC and the containers access it just fine.
WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
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).
iagovar 7y ago
Maybe scalingo.com or fortrabbit.com for php?
vidar 7y ago
render.com is a really strong PaaS, quite recent but showing great promise.
jwr 7y ago
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.
- asdkhadsj 7y ago
  That may be true for some, but it's not true for me - currently. Ie, if I could get a DB/FS + PaaS for $5/m I'd use it in a heartbeat. If I run into a wall where I need to manually tweak some fine detail, I can always fall back to normal deployments, right? PaaS in concept fits exactly what many of us seek. Deploying apps without managing ops. Just because it's not infinitely powerful doesn't mean it's a reason no one would use a PaaS. PaaS fits a very real use case. In my somewhat edge case though, hobby/side projects, I can't pay much for them. So I manage the ops myself currently because I can save money, but if Heroku was just a bit more cheap I'd use them.

amatecha 7y ago

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.

filmgirlcw 7y ago
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. Great team tho and always very receptive in IRC.
superkuh 7y ago
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.
- slipwalker 7y ago
  just wondering what is your setup for this mailserver ? Which OS, smtpd, IMAPd, etc...
  - superkuh 7y ago
    I followed the general outline of the ispmail tutorials at https://workaround.org/ispmail https://workaround.org/ispmail . Debian based, postfix, dovecot, mysql, postgray (spam mitigation), catchall for the entire domain and only access it from imap clients or ssh'ing in. Doing webmail seemed like too much work to keep things secure. I self signed all my certs since it's just for me and very easy to set up and maintain (unlike letsencrypt over the same time span).

benbristow 7y ago

Been using DigitalOcean for a while now with a Dokku setup and running multiple sites/apps on it. 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 7y ago
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.

indigodaddy 7y ago

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. https://www.netcup.eu/bestellen/produkt.php?produkt=2006 https://www.netcup.eu/bestellen/produkt.php?produkt=2006

porker 7y ago
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."
- olex 7y ago
  You pay for 6 months at a time. If you cancel, you get money back for however much you didn't use.
  - indigodaddy 7y ago
    Yep, and if you want to pay monthly, go for a rootserver, but for those the cheapest is the 8.99EUR one I originally referenced that I have.
mylonov 7y ago
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.
- indigodaddy 7y ago
  Yes, you go thru the auth process, pay, and then they email you VM details after provisioning. Fairly standard. I don't think they claim to be very "cloudy," so yeah you're not going to get on-demand VM's you can just spin up like DO/Vultr. Perhaps they're hourly billing is confusing or misleading to lead you to think that. And it honestly really isn't hourly billing I don't think, unless they don't bill if you turn the VM off (never tested that).

Havoc 7y ago

If you're willing to take a chance on smaller operations you can get significantly more powerful stuff. e.g. I purchased a VPS with 3vcore and 4gig RAM at 6 USD a month during black friday

wvh 7y ago

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.

m_b 7y ago

Regarding Scaleway lack of rDNS for IPv6: it's because they don't support it. Customers (like I was) asked for it many times since 2016 but it seems too hard to implement for them.

nieve 7y ago
In my experience Scaleway isn't worth the risk. I had multiple weeks-long periods for different vpses (and both FreeBSD & Linux) over the course of two years where their network-mounted root disks would start throwing errors and then drop offline entirely. Worse, after one of these incidents their control panel usually wouldn't allow a reboot. I went round and round with support and the most they ever did was clear a flag for that and tell me they were experiencing network issues. I've also used Ramnode, Linode, Servercheap, Amazon, Heroku, various small local colo companies over, etc. and Scaleway was the only actively bad one. Unexpected outages, disk corruption, and usually not even a credit when I'd been up and down for days. If you have problems like that with your infrastructure and they crop up on and off for years, you need to bring in new people and invest in infrastructure. They aren't going to.
- iseeyou 7y ago
  I have similar experience with Scaleway for the disks. I have been running a few cheap dedicated ARM/Atom servers there for many years. It seems be a tied to a specific host or model, I have one of the first arm's which has been dead stable, but I have seen disk issues with both my new Atom's and newer ARM's. I still use them for some non-critical stuff because their cheap dedicated ARM and Atom's give you isolation like a dedicated machine. In combination with a LUKS mount I like to think it's safer against any Meltdown/Rowhammer-like attacks than a shared instance. But if you want a stable VPS you might have better luck elsewhere.
progval 7y ago
IPv6 is a second-class citizen on Scaleway. eg. IPv4 addresses are independent resources that can be assigned to any server (or load balancer), IPv6 are tied to a specific server, and can't be moved to an other one. And their load balancer does not support IPv6.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

n1vz3r 7y ago

BTW author of the article is Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of PHP language (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf)

627467 7y ago

I have a contabo ssd vps with 8gb ram for ~5eur/month I'm quite happy for bango for buck

mirimir 7y ago

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 BitHost is a Digital Ocean reseller.

ignorantguy 7y ago

lowendbox has a lot of good options.

bufferoverflow 7y ago
LowEndBox indeed has great deals once in a while, but it's impossible to navigate. You can't search by specs. If you want a cheap VPS/dedicated server with certain specs, try https://www.serverhunter.com/ https://www.serverhunter.com/ And if you don't mind dealing with the russian UI, try https://poiskvps.ru/ https://poiskvps.ru/
imPndy 7y ago
i would not recommend to look for hosts there. Most (say 90%) of the hosts seen there are hosted on Colocrossing that actually owns both LowendBox and Lowendtalk (forum, thats mostly ran by volunteers) just today it turns out many of the hosts (20 and still increasing) posted there just suddenly decide to close shop, all at once, with the same email from all of them. This isnt even the first time this has happened, but it is on a larger scale. (you can read more about this on lowendtalk if interested)

jacob019 7y ago

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.

amanzi 7y ago

For those of us in NZ, there are only three providers on the list of "good" or "really good" that have a presence in Sydney: Vultr (https://www.vultr.com/ https://www.vultr.com/), Linode (https://www.linode.com https://www.linode.com), and VPS Server (https://www.vpsserver.com/ https://www.vpsserver.com/).

berkut 7y ago
I'm in NZ, and Vultr has been awesome for me, although no block storage in Sydney... AWS is available (with Lightsail as well) in Sydney as well (albeit with reduced bandwidth compared to other regions for the pricing).
jonny383 7y ago
+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.
- amanzi 7y ago
  I've used Vultr for a few years now and am overall very happy. I just wish they'd bring their block storage offering to Sydney too.
  - jonny383 7y ago
    Can't +1 this enough!
mekster 7y ago
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.

bullen 7y ago

I'm surprised that smaller companies have not moved away from static pricing yet. 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).

perennate 7y ago
There is https://www.serverhunter.com/ 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. There is also https://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/ https://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/ which conducts regular tests and may give a more complete picture.
pipeep 7y ago
> 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! Bandwidth in Asia is significantly more expensive (https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-costs-around-the-world/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-costs-around-the-world...), so most budget hosting providers stay away.

exikyut 7y ago

Two related questions not answered in this article: - Where can I find good low-cost KVM with decent monthly bandwidth in Australia? Primarily want a remote fast Linux/VNC desktop (which will chew a lot of bandwidth), and want bandwidth left over to actually do things with. - There's no mention of Oracle's always-free cloud offerings (100GB disk, 1GB RAM, 10TB bandwidth). Interested to hear what people think of this.

yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
> Oracle's always-free cloud offerings (100GB disk, 1GB RAM, 10TB bandwidth). Interested to hear what people think of this. It's Oracle; wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole.
- awill 7y ago
  hm.. I looked into this. I do agree to not touch Oracle, but free is free, right? What's the worst case? They turn it off or are unreliable?
  - Kwpolska 7y ago
    You try to install Java on your Oracle VPS, and some time later, you end up with a nastygram from their lawyers in your mailbox.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
    The worst case is probably that their "free" service has fine print that results in their lawyers handing you a large bill, probably by making it easy for you to accidentally use paid features. (Precedent: VirtualBox extensions)
InvaderFizz 7y ago
I'm quite happy with their free tier. I have two Ubuntu machines hosting various docker images. Network bandwidth seems capped at around 50mbps, but that is perfectly adequate for my needs. CPU is quite strong, it's two AMD Zen vCPUs. The compile times for a few of my containers was acceptable. Three downsides: -No reverse DNS (at least I couldn't get it to work) -No IPv6 -It's Oracle, I made sure I only used personal info and would never consider it for work purposes.

boris 7y ago

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.

tyingq 7y ago
I'm happy with OVH. But, I do agree that their support isn't always great. However, it's dirt cheap, so I adjust my expectations accordingly. In the situation you describe, for example, it's not hard to add a new IP address in their admin panel and update DNS.
voidwtf 7y ago
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.

interfixus 7y ago

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.

zjra 7y ago
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/ 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.
adar 7y ago
LunaNode has been great, I just wish they had even one US location or something that wasn't on OVH's network.

tambre 7y ago

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.

tyingq 7y ago
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 https://yandex.com/support/connect/add-domain.html (assuming Russian hosting is okay for you)
- tambre 7y ago
  Been running my mail server on Linode for almost 2 years now. Fortunately I've yet to run in any issues. Having setup all the stuff properly from day 1 probably helps (TLS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, MTA-STS).
  - tyingq 7y ago
    Do you send a fair amount of email? Where I had trouble was running an ecom site. We set up all the things you mention correctly. We never sent any unsolicited email, but I assume people might occasionally flag a receipt or password reset as spam, and then it was game over for our email getting delivered. No issues since switching to gSuite.
    - tambre 7y ago
      Personal email server so I only send a small amount. Sometimes a few emails per day, some weeks only 1. Did the outgoing emails for the site ramp up fast? Did you only encounter issues with Gmail or with other big providers too?

fake-name 7y ago

This is one of those areas where if the company selling this sort of product isn't maintaining modules for their service in ansible/puppet/saltstack/etc...., they're really doing theirselves a disservice. I've had to fix the saltstack vultr integration multiple times when they break it. it's really annoying.

gigatexal 7y ago

DD is a terrible way to benchmark disks. You want to use fio like is done here: https://www.storagereview.com/node/3520 https://www.storagereview.com/node/3520

todotask 7y ago

For UpCloud referral, you still need to deposit 10USD to get on top of 25USD free (non-expiry date), it's overall a better deal.

cerberusss 7y ago

My preferred remote desktop tool is TeamViewer. Almost no VPS actually supports this, because TeamViewer needs a virtual graphics card (that's what I'm calling it, but I actually don't know what to call it). Linode used to provide one at 1024x768, but I think they no longer do so. Vultr however does support one, at 1280x1024. Anybody else have this preference for TeamViewer?

Youden 7y ago
Apparently TeamViewer supports headless Linux servers: https://www.teamviewer.com/en/remote-access-headless-linux/ https://www.teamviewer.com/en/remote-access-headless-linux/ I'm guessing what you're getting at here though is that you want to manage the server through a desktop interface, complete with windows and menus and the like. Most people don't do that on Linux servers because most of the things you need to interact with to administrate one are only accessible through a command line interface. That said, if you really want to manage a Linux server graphically, you might be able to make it work with something like Xvfb.
- cerberusss 7y ago
  Yeah, I want a desktop. I manage my server via ssh of course, any extra graphical cruft is a liability there. > Xvfb I might, but I've tried a zillion things, and they all suck when you compare it to the ease of use that TeamViewer offers. What I also left out, is that I've already got the TeamViewer client running, because I remote into macOS and Windows.
  - Youden 7y ago
    Xvfb would give you the virtual desktop that the TeamViewer Server gives you access to. You'd still use the TeamViewer client to connect to it. Xvfb is just a way of running a graphical environment on a machine that doesn't otherwise have one.
    - cerberusss 7y ago
      That is... interesting. Is it maintained and packaged by the distros? It doesn't look like it. Duckduckgo gives me a bunch of old 2012-2013 results.

pnutjam 7y ago

I didn't see time4vps on here. They are the only provider I've seen with large storage vps's for a reasonable price. I use one to do all my cloud backups and I can still run afew services on top.

prirun 7y ago
Hmm... their largest storage VPS, 8TB, is $1437 USD/yr, which works out to around $15/mo/TB. This is 3x more expensive than Backblaze B2 @ $5/TB/mo. It seems like you'd do better using something like B2 for cloud backups and getting a $5/mo Linode VPS or $2.50/mo Vultr VPS for your other services. I use both Linode and Vultr and like them both.
- pnutjam 7y ago
  I'm on 1tb, so it's a break even to use b2 and add another cheap vps. Plus I can use Borg.

vpskalasatama 7y ago

"Nobody" needs more than 300M/s IO bandwidth... It's the IOPS that matter..so this comparison is rubbish

nickjj 7y ago

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.

justkez 7y ago

I've been running some live services on Hetzner Cloud (https://www.hetzner.com/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

coleifer 7y ago

Why was Rasmus so concerned about reverse DNS? That's not something I'm very familiar with. Can anyone help explain?

tyingq 7y ago
Reverse DNS is what maps an IP address to a host name. A PTR-record type is used to store reverse DNS entries. The name of the PTR-record is the IP address with the segments in reverse order followed by ".in-addr.arpa". For example the reverse DNS entry for IP 2.3.4.5 would be stored as a PTR-record for "5.4.3.2.in-addr.arpa". That then points to "somehost.yourdomain.tld". It's important for things like email, where the receiver can do a reverse DNS lookup to make sure your host is supposed to be sending email from "example.domain". Lacking proper reverse DNS, your outgoing email could be marked as spam. Or rejected outright for one not existing. It's also used for some forms of SPF entries (though that's discouraged). Last, it's somewhat useful for logs if you have hosts in your domain that connect to each other. Though, usually, you're encouraged NOT to configure apache, syslogd, etc, to do reverse DNS lookups...for performance reasons.

Havoc 7y ago

Huge bunch of fly-by-night VPS shops shut down earlier today: https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/161957/psa-a-bunch-of-leb-hosts-deadpooling-arkahosting-supremevps-umaxhosting-hosting73-hostbrz-ku/p1 https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/161957/psa-a-bunch-of-... Be careful out there guys

drej 7y ago

I may have messed it up, but last time I tried Lightsail (being a loooong time user of Digital Ocean), I set up a CPU-intensive workload and it stalled within a short period of time. Then I found out the Lightsail instances are t-based ones, so I ran out of credits? So I guess it depends on the workload as well.

Ayesh 7y ago

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.