7 ms·

For those interested in this kind of thing, there are two fun resources I would recommend. First, LowEndBox (https://lowendbox.com/ https://lowendbox.com/) whic

For those interested in this kind of thing, there are two fun resources I would recommend. First, LowEndBox (https://lowendbox.com/ https://lowendbox.com/) which documents where you can get VPS hosting for as little as $1/month or even cheaper in some instances. Second, Super Dimensional Fortress (http://sdf.org/ http://sdf.org/) where for a $1 you can get lifetime low level hosting and for $25 you can get access to a much beefier server. A community of old school *nix nerds comes as a bonus.

dannyw 6y ago
Just watch out: lots of the low end box providers end up shutting down, and may take your servers and data with it. I now stick to reputable “value” providers like BuyVM. Having an operator I can discord and get frank answers, as well as a commitment to privacy (Tor exit nodes welcomed), is nice.
- devwastaken 6y ago
  I remember their employees in their politics chat being angry conspiracy theorists and being entirely unreasonable similar to q conspirators. There's no problem with disagreement in politics but there's a line of general reasoning skills that bleeds into their actions. I don't trust those people having access to someone's server/data, especially if they are quote "liberal" or "progressive"
- klodolph 6y ago
  This is one of the reasons why business negotiation books will remind you that when you’re making a deal with a vendor, you want to make a deal that is profitable for the vendor and supports / sustains their business. If you don’t, then you’ll have to find a new vendor after they collapse (or get rid of you as a client). For personal hosting I think one of the problems that makes this more complicated is that even as a group, you’re nobody’s biggest customer. You’re just a side business for someone selling hosting B2B, usually. I know that the local grocery store will make sure that they can still sell to local customers, because that’s the core of their business; I’m not so sure that cloud providers care much about my dinky website.
- EricE 6y ago
  >and may take your servers and data with it. Only if you let them. Do people seriously NOT perform backups via independent methods utterly independent of their primary cloud service provider? No one remembers Photobucket or the hundreds of other cloud services that went "poof" into the night? There is no cloud, just someone else's computer - always have backups of some other means. A different provider with a different account, alternate mechanisms (i.e. email addresses with different email providers, etc.) to get to that data and accounts... It's even easier now with VM's, snapshots, free open source backup software that understands all of that - fairly inexpensive commercial solutions like veem - there is zero excuse. My favorite was a small SAAS provider that had all their backup infrastructure on AWS under the same account as the test/dev and operations - and someone got in and deleted it all. Partitioning - yes, it's an essential thing. And not just for technical. Separation of duties. Requiring concurrence by more than one person for critical operations. Lessons that should have been learned from past experience. Peoples (especially developers) eyes glaze over with documents like NIST 800-53 - but all those controls exist from experience. The bigger/more critical your system is to your survival, the more of those controls you should have answers for!
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    Honestly, they generally don't go poof. I remember I had a VPS for more than 10 years with Hetzner. No poofing till they had to get rid of that offering. I have the backups but I think now I prefer just running on GKE + RDS for funsies. Costs a bunch (like $50/mo) but I don't have to worry about anything. And fuck me if I'm ever writing a BIND zonefile ever again.
    - qeternity 6y ago
      > GKE + RDS Uh what? Really? This doubles your failure surface.
      - renewiltord 6y ago
        True, but I only need two nines. It's my personal stuff.
tacon 6y ago
lowendbox.com was great to start, but they got popular, and then profitable, and finally were bought by a low end hosting aggregator/rollup, and now almost all the different offers on lowendbox.com are coming from essentially the same company. The sister site, lowendtalk.com, seems to have picked up the mantle of open discussions, and they have offers, too. For example, recently I bought a 1GB KVM VPS for $14.83/yr. With KVM, I can use netboot.xyz and play to my hearts content with any Linux distro I want. I have NixOS running on it at the moment. On another, I'm playing with dokku, which takes over the whole VPS as a heroku clone. These companies are often unstable, so regular backups of anything you might be sad losing are vital. I recommend paying by the month, if that is available, and using this whitelist of low end providers who have been in business for a reasonable length of time[0]. [0] https://lowendboxes.review/the-whitelist/ https://lowendboxes.review/the-whitelist/
jart 6y ago
I'm so glad Super Dimensional Fortress is still around. I learned how to use Unix thanks to them back in the 1990s. They're in a different league than the goofballs selling unlimited web hosting cheaper than arizona iced tea.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
  This. sdf.org is awesome.
- cromka 6y ago
  And their VPN service is a steal!
- zepatrik 6y ago
  Just had a good 2h read on internet history.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
jcun4128 6y ago
> SDF cool name (know the show) I'll have to check these out I've been using OVH all this time, also GitHub pages is pretty cool.
mobilio 6y ago
It's better to get something even free like AwardSpace (https://www.awardspace.com https://www.awardspace.com)
boarnoah 6y ago
Definitely be careful with hosts off Lowendbox, as other commenters have mentioned providers go offline without warning all the time. Never pay more than a year in advance etc... Notorious for "Deadpooling", providers sell ultra cheap hosts. Run them on over-provisioned servers for a year or two and disappear overnight. ex: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/12/08/1549222/20-low-end-vps-providers-suddenly-shutting-down-in-a-deadpooling-scam https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/12/08/1549222/20-low-end-...
lupire 6y ago
Also nearlyfreespeech.net is old and cheap and doesn't police legal content.
- jodrellblank 6y ago
  > "doesn't police legal content." What does that mean - what would it mean to "police legal content"?
  - newen 6y ago
    Topical example is Parler getting shut down by AWS for whatever reason Amazon gave.
    - seneca 6y ago
      Knowingly breaking guidelines here, with apologies, but why in the world is this downvoted? It's an accurate and timely example.
      - jfengel 6y ago
        Saying "whatever reason Amazon gave" is a pretty good reason to downvote it. Amazon gave reasons. If you can cite them, then you can disagree with them. But to simply wave those reasons away as "whatever" is intended to convey "that was obviously legal content being shut down for purely ideological reasons", and that is simply not the case. The "reason Amazon gave" was "content that threatens the public safety, such as by inciting and planning the rape, torture, and assassination of named public officials and private citizens", with examples given in: https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.294664/gov.uscourts.wawd.294664.10.0_1.pdf https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.294664... So it's a bad example of something being dismissed for ideological reasons, and a bad example of something whose reasons can be assumed when the answer was easily available. That's an excellent reason to downvote something. It's simply not accurate.
        jimmydorry 6y ago

dannyw 6y ago

Just watch out: lots of the low end box providers end up shutting down, and may take your servers and data with it. I now stick to reputable “value” providers like BuyVM. Having an operator I can discord and get frank answers, as well as a commitment to privacy (Tor exit nodes welcomed), is nice.

devwastaken 6y ago
I remember their employees in their politics chat being angry conspiracy theorists and being entirely unreasonable similar to q conspirators. There's no problem with disagreement in politics but there's a line of general reasoning skills that bleeds into their actions. I don't trust those people having access to someone's server/data, especially if they are quote "liberal" or "progressive"
klodolph 6y ago
This is one of the reasons why business negotiation books will remind you that when you’re making a deal with a vendor, you want to make a deal that is profitable for the vendor and supports / sustains their business. If you don’t, then you’ll have to find a new vendor after they collapse (or get rid of you as a client). For personal hosting I think one of the problems that makes this more complicated is that even as a group, you’re nobody’s biggest customer. You’re just a side business for someone selling hosting B2B, usually. I know that the local grocery store will make sure that they can still sell to local customers, because that’s the core of their business; I’m not so sure that cloud providers care much about my dinky website.
EricE 6y ago
>and may take your servers and data with it. Only if you let them. Do people seriously NOT perform backups via independent methods utterly independent of their primary cloud service provider? No one remembers Photobucket or the hundreds of other cloud services that went "poof" into the night? There is no cloud, just someone else's computer - always have backups of some other means. A different provider with a different account, alternate mechanisms (i.e. email addresses with different email providers, etc.) to get to that data and accounts... It's even easier now with VM's, snapshots, free open source backup software that understands all of that - fairly inexpensive commercial solutions like veem - there is zero excuse. My favorite was a small SAAS provider that had all their backup infrastructure on AWS under the same account as the test/dev and operations - and someone got in and deleted it all. Partitioning - yes, it's an essential thing. And not just for technical. Separation of duties. Requiring concurrence by more than one person for critical operations. Lessons that should have been learned from past experience. Peoples (especially developers) eyes glaze over with documents like NIST 800-53 - but all those controls exist from experience. The bigger/more critical your system is to your survival, the more of those controls you should have answers for!
- renewiltord 6y ago
  Honestly, they generally don't go poof. I remember I had a VPS for more than 10 years with Hetzner. No poofing till they had to get rid of that offering. I have the backups but I think now I prefer just running on GKE + RDS for funsies. Costs a bunch (like $50/mo) but I don't have to worry about anything. And fuck me if I'm ever writing a BIND zonefile ever again.
  - qeternity 6y ago
    > GKE + RDS Uh what? Really? This doubles your failure surface.
    - renewiltord 6y ago
      True, but I only need two nines. It's my personal stuff.

tacon 6y ago

lowendbox.com was great to start, but they got popular, and then profitable, and finally were bought by a low end hosting aggregator/rollup, and now almost all the different offers on lowendbox.com are coming from essentially the same company. The sister site, lowendtalk.com, seems to have picked up the mantle of open discussions, and they have offers, too. For example, recently I bought a 1GB KVM VPS for $14.83/yr. With KVM, I can use netboot.xyz and play to my hearts content with any Linux distro I want. I have NixOS running on it at the moment. On another, I'm playing with dokku, which takes over the whole VPS as a heroku clone. These companies are often unstable, so regular backups of anything you might be sad losing are vital. I recommend paying by the month, if that is available, and using this whitelist of low end providers who have been in business for a reasonable length of time[0]. [0] https://lowendboxes.review/the-whitelist/ https://lowendboxes.review/the-whitelist/

jart 6y ago

I'm so glad Super Dimensional Fortress is still around. I learned how to use Unix thanks to them back in the 1990s. They're in a different league than the goofballs selling unlimited web hosting cheaper than arizona iced tea.

TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
This. sdf.org is awesome.
cromka 6y ago
And their VPN service is a steal!
zepatrik 6y ago
Just had a good 2h read on internet history.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

jcun4128 6y ago

> SDF cool name (know the show) I'll have to check these out I've been using OVH all this time, also GitHub pages is pretty cool.

mobilio 6y ago

It's better to get something even free like AwardSpace (https://www.awardspace.com https://www.awardspace.com)

boarnoah 6y ago

Definitely be careful with hosts off Lowendbox, as other commenters have mentioned providers go offline without warning all the time. Never pay more than a year in advance etc... Notorious for "Deadpooling", providers sell ultra cheap hosts. Run them on over-provisioned servers for a year or two and disappear overnight. ex: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/12/08/1549222/20-low-end-vps-providers-suddenly-shutting-down-in-a-deadpooling-scam https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/12/08/1549222/20-low-end-...

lupire 6y ago

Also nearlyfreespeech.net is old and cheap and doesn't police legal content.

jodrellblank 6y ago
> "doesn't police legal content." What does that mean - what would it mean to "police legal content"?
- newen 6y ago
  Topical example is Parler getting shut down by AWS for whatever reason Amazon gave.
  - seneca 6y ago
    Knowingly breaking guidelines here, with apologies, but why in the world is this downvoted? It's an accurate and timely example.
    - jfengel 6y ago
      Saying "whatever reason Amazon gave" is a pretty good reason to downvote it. Amazon gave reasons. If you can cite them, then you can disagree with them. But to simply wave those reasons away as "whatever" is intended to convey "that was obviously legal content being shut down for purely ideological reasons", and that is simply not the case. The "reason Amazon gave" was "content that threatens the public safety, such as by inciting and planning the rape, torture, and assassination of named public officials and private citizens", with examples given in: https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.294664/gov.uscourts.wawd.294664.10.0_1.pdf https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.294664... So it's a bad example of something being dismissed for ideological reasons, and a bad example of something whose reasons can be assumed when the answer was easily available. That's an excellent reason to downvote something. It's simply not accurate.
      - jimmydorry 6y ago