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Run OpenBSD on DigitalOcean for $4/month
- slekker 2mo agoFor a little bit more you can rent on https://openbsd.amsterdam https://openbsd.amsterdam - they also donate to the OpenBSD foundation!
- 8by3 2mo agoThey are cool, man they've grown. I used that when there were ~20 VM's on there. Its a great project but think its only physically in Amsterdam which is why I ended up moving back to vultr, as they have many more options.
- leonheld 2mo agoMan I always look at this project with nothing by awe. I'd love to start something like this... if you're in central Switzerland and would like to copy their model, hit me up.
- doublepg23 2mo ago+1 for obsd.ams , great VPS!
- somat 2mo agoopenbsd.amsterdam is notable because they use the openbsd native vmm as the vm host. It is obsd all the way down over there. It is a small and no frills service but the sys-admin, who runs the project, is very helpful and attentive. That is to say probably much better and human customer service than the big players. There are definite downsides, but if a project fits, highly recommended.
- atmosx 2mo agoGreat service for small personal blog or a testbed. OpenBSD has httpd + acme client for SSL termination & automated rotation so the base system has just enough to host a low traffic website. For anything that requires uptime one will have to buy multiple VMs and handle the uptime story themselves, since they go down regularly for maintenance. The fact that they donate back to OpenBSD is great though. I own a VM there for testing stuff.
- 8by3 2mo agoI've always gone with Vultr (vultr.com) for BSD VMs, its properly supported by them and while I've never hard verified this, they seem like a nice smaller player. Like they have offered Open/Free BSD VM's for > 10 years, kind of nice.
- SoftTalker 2mo agoI used buyvm.net for BSD a while back. Didn't have any issues, and the few times I contacted their support they were quick to respond and helpful. rootbsd.net before that, but they don't seem to exist anymore.
- darksim905 2mo agoThe admins have access to your data and unless things have changed, that isn't monitored. They also bend to NSLs like any other provider. What they charge vs what things cost hurts.
- thesuitonym 2mo agoAny cloud compute vendor will have access to your data unless you encrypt it.
- cyanmagenta 2mo ago> unless you encrypt it And to clarify, this means encrypt it before it gets to the VPS. Just having full-disk encryption is not enough because cloud providers can dump RAM. There are tools that easily extract encryption keys from RAM. So, really, you need to trust the cloud provider unless everything is encrypted on computers you own.
- aaron_m04 2mo ago> And to clarify, this means encrypt it before it gets to the VPS. Just having full-disk encryption is not enough because cloud providers can dump RAM. There are tools that easily extract encryption keys from RAM. True, but at the very least, you won't have to worry about discarded SSDs having your data in plaintext.
- cedricgle 2mo agoDoes DigitalOcean still only propose up to 4 basic cpu as droplet maximum ?. All their compute capacities disappeared overnight 2025/2026 without any reason.
- andai 2mo agoI heard all the RAM scheduled to be manufactured next year had already been sold out. Maybe that's a related phenomenon? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49207236 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49207236 e.g. Hetzner tripled prices recently. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48542064 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48542064
- daneel_w 2mo agoI run OpenBSD at netcup.de for €2/month. It's very low-spec, but it's enough.
- Scarbutt 2mo agoCrazy that after so many years of cloud compute a 8GB VM is $48/mo.
- toast0 2mo agoIf you can, it really makes sense to look for low cost dedicated servers. For $35/month I get a whole machine with dual L5520 and 24 GB of ram. I used to have a little nicer server for a little less, but that provider had to close because their costs for electricity and space went up too fast. Yes, the L5520 is ancient, but my server needs are tiny and it's fun to have a whole machine. Look on webhostingtalk or lowendbox or lowendtalk.
- slowin 2mo ago> that provider had to close because their costs for electricity and space went up too fast This is kind of exactly what I worry about with a dedicated box. That and hardware failure.
- toast0 2mo agoIt wasn't too big of a deal, I backup the host on the regular, so it was only a mild pain to relocate.
- dhruvrrp 2mo agoI currently use hetzner and DO, but a while back when I was trying to find cheaper alternatives, and hetzner pretty good for its price to performance ratio. Smaller vps providers were crazy oversubscribed that would get pretty inconsistent performance. None of the dedicated machines I found were cheaper, so I'm surprised someone is offering that for $35/month.
- githubholobeat 2mo agoYou can even go completely free with Cloudflare tunnel with your own office/home hardware. I have a simple web running on my old Raspberry Pi 3 + nginx + golang web app. Also with ssh access to the Pi.
- xp84 2mo agoYes, the cloudflare SSH tunneling works well -- though I think the fact that SSL is provisioned means it'll show up in the cert transparency log, possibly attracting unwanted attention to probe my home systems. I ended up turning that off and switching to Tailscale. Tailscale is set to advertise my home IP range (I chose one that's not 192.168 based which avoids problems with range conflicts). So I can just connect to Tailscale and connect to 10.X.Y.Z as though I'm home. If I want memorable hostnames I can point DNS records to those private IPs.
- altmanaltman 2mo agoYou still have to pay for electricity. If you consider that "completely free" then paying $4 per month should also be considered "completely free".
- githubholobeat 2mo agoTrue. It is about $0.55 per month on the FPL bill if my Raspberry Pi 3 runs 24/7.
- hughw 2mo agoYou don't even need your own hardware. You can serve your site using the free CF Workers plan. Of course, that's a different goal than running bsd in an aggressively tiny cloud instance.
- trashb 2mo agoI've thought about this as well but I was not too comfortable with it. As I understand it it is a reverse tunnel from your internal network to cloudflare? If your device is compromised it may lead to an attacker using that tunnel to access your internal network through the host device?
- assimpleaspossi 2mo agoRamNode does $2/month but just one ipv6 address. Add a ipv4 address and it's $4/month.
- basilikum 2mo agoAnything below /64 should be straight up illegal. We got IPv6 just so people can dot the exact same dumb shit with it that IPv4 forced us to do.
- FLeXMurphy 2mo agoDO burned me recently due to their unwillingness to handle DDOS attacks: "The best we can do is change your IP." Thanks guys. Switched to OVH immediately.
- forinti 2mo agoI tried to warn them that they were hosting a phishing site once and they weren't very receptive. Otherwise, I hosted a site with them for years and all went well.
- crest 2mo agoThey're also too stupid to understand that they've been dropping UDP datagrams with src port == dst port and < 1024. This obviously breaks IPsec IKE. I showed them dummy traffic captured with netcat and tcpdump, but they refused to admit they caused the problem. They repeatedly claimed to see nothing dropped between the pcap files, that I was doing it to myself with a firewall that wasn't even enabled, or that this is just how a network is supposed to work.
- thatjoeoverthr 2mo agoI migrated a client off for the same reason. The “app platform” ran behind Cloudflare, but they run the Cloudflare, so I couldn’t put it behind my own Cloudflare, nor could I configure it and solve the problem. Moved the entire thing to Hetzner, fast. What a week.
- dvdyzag 2mo agoA warning sign indeed for long time users of DO. Their marketing basically says "yes, we handle those".
- tolerance 2mo agoBack in my day a blog post like this would've included a promotional link for $100 in DigitalOcean credits!
- blacksmith_tb 2mo agoNow DO has to plow those loss-leading Marketing dollars into paying for memory I expect...
- dchest 2mo agoA warning about openbsdhandbook[.]com - this website has completely incorrect information for some things. Like hallucinated, even though I think it was created before LLMs.
- SoftTalker 2mo agoFor BSD (especially OpenBSD) you can pretty much just use the man pages and the online FAQ. They are really good. If you want a book, Absolute OpenBSD is good though a bit out of date now. A lot of it would still be applicable though, if backed up by the current man pages. Reading undeadly.org is a another good way to keep up on developments.
- tolerance 2mo agoWhile we are recommending and un-recommending resources https://romanzolotarev.com/bsd/ https://romanzolotarev.com/bsd/ has been my go-to. joshua stein's interest in getting OpenBSD running on anything he can provides useful insight too https://jcs.org/tagged/openbsd https://jcs.org/tagged/openbsd
- imwally 2mo agoDang, I didn't know that. I thought it was decent enough to get people exposed to doas(1), pkg_add(1), syspatch(8), etc... from which they could then read the man pages. Thanks for pointing this out and I appreciate the other recommendations in this thread. Massive +1 for @jcs. That dude is awesome and puts out great stuff.
- imwally 2mo agoI made an edit to my post because you're not the only one to point this out. Just wanted to say thanks again!
- bananamogul 2mo agoThat pricing is awful. $4/month for 512MB VPS...eeek. You'll find much better pricing at RackNerd, DediRock, InterServer, BuyVM, etc. Small indy hosting companies are the way to go. 2GB for $5/month or so is the typical price point. Any host that offers KVM and allows you to upload your own ISO can run OpenBSD (or FreeBSD, NetBSD, whatever you want). Check out LowEndTalk or LowEndBox for deals. There are other sites but that's where I shop. Sure, if you need an API, or if you want to host in one of the less common locations, or if you absolutely must have five nines, then DO or Vultr or Linode or Amazon LightSail can be a good fit. But if you just need a VPS with a control panel in a typical hosting location (Amsterdam, LA, New York, Chicago, Singapore, etc.) then I don't see the point of paying more at one of the big hosts.
- daymanstep 2mo agoLightsail does not offer five nines.
- irishcoffee 2mo agoNeither does GitHub, and for whatever reason everyone and their cousin uses it still. :)
- serf 2mo agoeveryone uses github because everyone uses github. it's relying strictly on social effect right now.
- bigstrat2003 2mo agoWell yeah, obviously. I think the point was that uptime is not the only concern, and that a service sufficiently attractive in other ways can get people to overlook a lack of reliability.
- reassess_blind 2mo agoUptime is overrated.
- EtienneDeLyon 2mo ago[dead]
- davidkwast 2mo agoOn Linode you can run any Linux for $5/month with 1gb of RAM and 25gb of storage
- kristianp 2mo agoI've had a 1GiB VPS for a while. I'm starting to think that I could have done with 512MB for the fairly simple jobs I have on it. As long as I get 1 whole CPU slice (no slowdowns) I'd be ok. The 10GB SSD would be tight, but a scheduled upload of logs/data to an S3 like service using rclone would be possible.
- ninjin 2mo agoAlways happy to see more people having fun with OpenBSD. Running my own set of OpenBSD boxes (although the public-facing ones are on Hetzner), so I read through the instructions and it aligns with my own experience (although I usually emphasise that most correct choices in the installer are just the default). However, this part: "Since this is going to be a bare-bones web server we can remove most of the sets.". This is not great advice. Reducing the number of sets even on a headless server can lead to issues with ports depending on libraries Xenocara provides that would then be missing (fonts, etc.). Likewise, when you upgrade the default is to install all sets unless you manually intervene, which could lead to a surprise bump in disk usage that you may not have accounted for. In general, reducing the number of sets should be considered "I am deviating from the defaults and I know what I am doing" territory and Theo keeps threatening to remove the option to select the sets in the installer when people complain and I am inclined to agree with him. So, if you have 10GB of disk in that Droplet, just do the OpenBSD thing and go with the defaults and you will be all the happier for it down the line. Messing with the installation size really is for those rare cases (fitting many VMs on a single host, ancient machines, etc.) where you have no other choice.
- xupybd 2mo agoA reminder that Oracle cloud has a free tier that gives you 2 vps
- cavoirom 2mo agoI've been running OpenBSD on DO for years. I have a very details guide about setting up iked just in case you are interested: https://ngxv.org/blog/entry/2021/01/14/openbsd-vpn https://ngxv.org/blog/entry/2021/01/14/openbsd-vpn P/S: The website is running on a Raspberry Pi 3 in my house, hope HN won't hug it to dead
- seeg 2mo agoYou can have a 1 GB ram VPN for $20 per year. https://mikr.us/ https://mikr.us/ But on a shared IPv4 as that what makes up much of the cost.
- c16 2mo agoFinding a vps from https://LowEndBox.com https://LowEndBox.com is the way. DigitalOcean is a rip off these days.
- kiproping 2mo agoWait, isn't that just a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, why would you pay $4 for that?
- austin-cheney 2mo agoThe 2 year Stack 4 plan at DreamHost is $6/month for a root level access VPS with your choice of OS. After the 2 year sale it shoots up to $11/month.
- simonebrunozzi 2mo agoWhich just reminds me of the eternal debate: OpenBSD or FreeBSD? Or even NetBSD? Which one is better?
- gorfian_robot 2mo agobetter for what?
- chanux 2mo agoBigCo free tier can be good enough for some cases. I have used GCP and it's been fairly alright.