4 ms·

Is there a way to buy droplets for a year at a time? Like 40$ for a year would be a sweet deal for the $4 droplet. Especially for things like PiHole and wiregua

Is there a way to buy droplets for a year at a time? Like 40$ for a year would be a sweet deal for the $4 droplet. Especially for things like PiHole and wireguard.

xmodem 3y ago
If your goal is to minimise costs, some of the cheaper providers that have offers on https://lowendbox.com/ https://lowendbox.com/ will have reasonable annual discounts.
- KronisLV 3y ago
  Do remember that there have been cases of some of the more budget oriented providers just folding and the company disappearing altogether. That actually happened with me, with DediStation: https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/114949/is-dedistation-a-reliable-company https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/114949/is-dedistation-a-re... Nowadays I'd generally go for hosting providers that have been around for some time. Hetzner: has both great features and affordable costs (I needed to verify my ID, though) Contabo: the prices are great, but the performance is a bit worse than other options Time4VPS: a Lithuanian provider that I used due to them being cheaper than Hetzner, unfortunately their prices have increased noticeably, only the yearly plans are worth it DigitalOcean, Scaleway, Vultr: all have good features, but can be expensive Azure, AWS, GCP: too complex and enterprisey for my private needs
  - yread 3y ago
    Happened to a friend of mine.His backups were the offsite but with same company so he was completely screwed
  - habibur 3y ago
    Also those hidden costs. You don't know about those until you are charged for it, and was written in their terms which you never bothered to read.
  - zootboy 3y ago
    I consider a provider from LowEndBox disappearing one day a near-certainty. In my experience (N = ~10), an average LEB provider will have an existence half-life of around 3 years. That's not to discourage anyone from using them; in fact, LEB VPS servers are pretty much all I use (each being ~$25 / year), and I've gotten quite good at keeping useful, tested backups, keeping redundancy in my services, and being able to stand up a new server quickly.
  - trillic 3y ago
    Contabo was pretty good in my eyes. Not as much I/O or CPU performance as a new droplet with a fancy new EPYC processor but lots of ram and storage for the price and some reasonably fast cores with little contention from what I could tell.
- trustingtrust 3y ago
  goal is to minimize costs from a big provider by buying in bulk. Something similar to spot instances.
sgarland 3y ago
No idea about DO, but for years I bought a t3a.micro for about $30/year. If you committed to 3 years it got even cheaper.

Is there a way to buy droplets for a year at a time? Like 40$ for a year would be a sweet deal for the $4 droplet. Especially for things like PiHole and wireguard.

xmodem 3y ago

If your goal is to minimise costs, some of the cheaper providers that have offers on https://lowendbox.com/ https://lowendbox.com/ will have reasonable annual discounts.

KronisLV 3y ago
Do remember that there have been cases of some of the more budget oriented providers just folding and the company disappearing altogether. That actually happened with me, with DediStation: https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/114949/is-dedistation-a-reliable-company https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/114949/is-dedistation-a-re... Nowadays I'd generally go for hosting providers that have been around for some time. Hetzner: has both great features and affordable costs (I needed to verify my ID, though) Contabo: the prices are great, but the performance is a bit worse than other options Time4VPS: a Lithuanian provider that I used due to them being cheaper than Hetzner, unfortunately their prices have increased noticeably, only the yearly plans are worth it DigitalOcean, Scaleway, Vultr: all have good features, but can be expensive Azure, AWS, GCP: too complex and enterprisey for my private needs
- yread 3y ago
  Happened to a friend of mine.His backups were the offsite but with same company so he was completely screwed
- habibur 3y ago
  Also those hidden costs. You don't know about those until you are charged for it, and was written in their terms which you never bothered to read.
- zootboy 3y ago
  I consider a provider from LowEndBox disappearing one day a near-certainty. In my experience (N = ~10), an average LEB provider will have an existence half-life of around 3 years. That's not to discourage anyone from using them; in fact, LEB VPS servers are pretty much all I use (each being ~$25 / year), and I've gotten quite good at keeping useful, tested backups, keeping redundancy in my services, and being able to stand up a new server quickly.
- trillic 3y ago
  Contabo was pretty good in my eyes. Not as much I/O or CPU performance as a new droplet with a fancy new EPYC processor but lots of ram and storage for the price and some reasonably fast cores with little contention from what I could tell.
trustingtrust 3y ago
goal is to minimize costs from a big provider by buying in bulk. Something similar to spot instances.

sgarland 3y ago

No idea about DO, but for years I bought a t3a.micro for about $30/year. If you committed to 3 years it got even cheaper.