4 ms·

I'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 playe

by 8by3 1mo ago

I'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 1mo ago
I 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 1mo ago
The 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 1mo ago
  Any cloud compute vendor will have access to your data unless you encrypt it.
  - cyanmagenta 1mo 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 1mo 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.
SpecialistK 1mo ago
They were very helpful when one of the AMD firmware patches in 7.3 caused my VPS to not boot. They even offered to apply a manual fix until patch -015 was available which fixed it.
QuantumNomad_ 1mo ago
I have a couple of FreeBSD VMs on Vultr. For quite some time sshd regularly dies on one of them and I am not sure why. A couple of theories I’ve had is that maybe a) my VM was compromised and there is a persistent rootkit installed that kills sshd, or b) file corruption after previous unclean shutdown has left some file needed by sshd corrupted and it leads to this behaviour, or c) maybe it’s running out of memory sometimes Each time I want to ssh into the machine I usually have to first connect with the VNC from the vultr dashboard to start sshd up again. It’s running the latest FreeBSD, as every now and then I log in and do an upgrade on it some time after a new version has been released. A persistent rootkit may have been installed if it was compromised between when some vulnerability became known and when I later upgraded next time. If a file was corrupted in an unclean shutdown in the past maybe it’s a file that has not been changed between FreeBSD versions so even though upgrades replace some files maybe it’s the same corrupted file all along. Ideally I’d just reinstall the machine, but that’s always more of a hassle than it should be so I continue running the VM in this broken state where sshd keeps dying every now and then.
- cyberpunk 1mo ago
  Well, you can at least run "freebsd-update IDS" on this system to verify the base system, "pkg check -s -a" would check the integrity of files installed via pkg also. It will only take a few min..
  - QuantumNomad_ 1mo ago
    Neat! Haven’t tried either of those before. While I’m at it I also took a quick look now at output of `top` and it’s sitting at 27 MB free RAM lol. So from that, out of memory is very likely the reason I keep having sshd die on me.
    - silisili 1mo ago
      Not familiar with BSD but does it not syslog oom kills like linux?
bityard 1mo ago
I remember when Vultr was new and had a single rack with a handful of boxes. Their site has no graphics apart from an ASCII logo. They had low prices but you often had to wait for them to build a new box before you could sign up. Their whole schtick at the time was, "we are building this for people who know what they are doing, don't bother us for support, we don't have any." But they are not that small anymore. They are now VC-funded, operate in 36 datacenters worldwide and are currently spending $1 billion to build an AI datacenter in Ohio.
- faded242 1mo ago
  Have been using vultr with very good stability for BSD systems since 2015 or so, highly recommend.
boomlinde 1mo ago
I've been considering https://openbsd.amsterdam/ https://openbsd.amsterdam/ as it seems like a nice way to donate to the project as well. For now I am using a lowest tier Hetzner instance. That gives more RAM but less disk space (which is pretty inconvenient for OpenBSDs automatic partitioning IMO).
- rootnod3 1mo ago
  You could also manually partition.
  - boomlinde 1mo ago
    As an OpenBSD noob I prefer not to until I get a good feel for how much will end up in them across a few sysupgrades.
    - rootnod3 1mo ago
      If you run it as a server mostly, I think the home partition at least can be shrunk to like 2GB or something.
- upofadown 1mo ago
  OBSD Amsterdam is pretty cool. I am currently running an instance on it. One feature that could also be considered a bug is that the VPSes run on the native OpenBSD virtualization scheme. My instance has suffered a few crashes over the years. It's been solid more recently. I suspect that OBSD Amsterdam and users have contributed to improvements to the native virtualization. So you control your instance by sshing into a BSD account on the server. You configure your reverse DNS the same way. It's OpenBSD all the way down. So, as mentioned, pretty cool. Possibly not for the OBSD user who prefers some sort of web based configuration for their VPS. It comes with access to a server you can copy your backups to. You of course do that from your instance using ssh.

by 8by3 1mo ago

SoftTalker 1mo ago

I 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 1mo ago

The 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 1mo ago
Any cloud compute vendor will have access to your data unless you encrypt it.
- cyanmagenta 1mo 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 1mo 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.

SpecialistK 1mo ago

They were very helpful when one of the AMD firmware patches in 7.3 caused my VPS to not boot. They even offered to apply a manual fix until patch -015 was available which fixed it.

QuantumNomad_ 1mo ago

I have a couple of FreeBSD VMs on Vultr. For quite some time sshd regularly dies on one of them and I am not sure why. A couple of theories I’ve had is that maybe a) my VM was compromised and there is a persistent rootkit installed that kills sshd, or b) file corruption after previous unclean shutdown has left some file needed by sshd corrupted and it leads to this behaviour, or c) maybe it’s running out of memory sometimes Each time I want to ssh into the machine I usually have to first connect with the VNC from the vultr dashboard to start sshd up again. It’s running the latest FreeBSD, as every now and then I log in and do an upgrade on it some time after a new version has been released. A persistent rootkit may have been installed if it was compromised between when some vulnerability became known and when I later upgraded next time. If a file was corrupted in an unclean shutdown in the past maybe it’s a file that has not been changed between FreeBSD versions so even though upgrades replace some files maybe it’s the same corrupted file all along. Ideally I’d just reinstall the machine, but that’s always more of a hassle than it should be so I continue running the VM in this broken state where sshd keeps dying every now and then.

cyberpunk 1mo ago
Well, you can at least run "freebsd-update IDS" on this system to verify the base system, "pkg check -s -a" would check the integrity of files installed via pkg also. It will only take a few min..
- QuantumNomad_ 1mo ago
  Neat! Haven’t tried either of those before. While I’m at it I also took a quick look now at output of `top` and it’s sitting at 27 MB free RAM lol. So from that, out of memory is very likely the reason I keep having sshd die on me.
  - silisili 1mo ago
    Not familiar with BSD but does it not syslog oom kills like linux?

bityard 1mo ago

I remember when Vultr was new and had a single rack with a handful of boxes. Their site has no graphics apart from an ASCII logo. They had low prices but you often had to wait for them to build a new box before you could sign up. Their whole schtick at the time was, "we are building this for people who know what they are doing, don't bother us for support, we don't have any." But they are not that small anymore. They are now VC-funded, operate in 36 datacenters worldwide and are currently spending $1 billion to build an AI datacenter in Ohio.

faded242 1mo ago
Have been using vultr with very good stability for BSD systems since 2015 or so, highly recommend.

boomlinde 1mo ago

I've been considering https://openbsd.amsterdam/ https://openbsd.amsterdam/ as it seems like a nice way to donate to the project as well. For now I am using a lowest tier Hetzner instance. That gives more RAM but less disk space (which is pretty inconvenient for OpenBSDs automatic partitioning IMO).

rootnod3 1mo ago
You could also manually partition.
- boomlinde 1mo ago
  As an OpenBSD noob I prefer not to until I get a good feel for how much will end up in them across a few sysupgrades.
  - rootnod3 1mo ago
    If you run it as a server mostly, I think the home partition at least can be shrunk to like 2GB or something.
upofadown 1mo ago
OBSD Amsterdam is pretty cool. I am currently running an instance on it. One feature that could also be considered a bug is that the VPSes run on the native OpenBSD virtualization scheme. My instance has suffered a few crashes over the years. It's been solid more recently. I suspect that OBSD Amsterdam and users have contributed to improvements to the native virtualization. So you control your instance by sshing into a BSD account on the server. You configure your reverse DNS the same way. It's OpenBSD all the way down. So, as mentioned, pretty cool. Possibly not for the OBSD user who prefers some sort of web based configuration for their VPS. It comes with access to a server you can copy your backups to. You of course do that from your instance using ssh.