DigitalOcean is joining the Omacom Foundation as a Founding Corporate Patron, contributing $1 million a year for three years! That’s a $3 million commitment to the development, maintenance, and spread of Omarchy. What…
I use GreenCloudVPS for a bunch of things. They used to have VPSes starting at $15/year for 2GB RAM and 20GB disk, but their current budget deals are still good (starts at $25/year for 4GB RAM and 35GB disk). These are on older hardware (mostly AMD EPYC Rome Zen 2 systems, ~5 years old) which is why they haven’t been affected by increased RAM and storage prices yet. https://greencloudvps.com/billing/store/budget-kvm-sale
HostHatch is good too. Their regular pricing aims to compete with Hetzner, but in 13 locations worldwide. https://hosthatch.com/products. They do sometimes have sales on LowEndTalk with pricing similar to GreenCloud’s “premium” plans.
RackNerd sometimes have good deals, although they’ve discontined quite a few of them recently. You can use https://racknerdtracker.com/ to see currently active deals. I still see a 2GB RAM + 35GB storage deal for $35/year for example.
I suspect all the very cheap ones (<$50/year) will eventually increase pricing. GreenCloud and HostHatch own all their hardware. Right now they use older hardware that’s already reached break-even, but all hardware needs to be replaced eventually, and the replacement cost for things like enterprise SSDs is a lot higher than it was in the past.
If you want to stick to big names, OVHcloud and Hetzner both have pretty good VPS pricing. OVH runs theirs on very old hardware like Haswell (2014/2015 era) Xeon E5 CPUs which is the main reason why they have cheaper pricing that Hetzner.
There’s also AWS Lightsail that’s essentially Amazon’s version of a VPS. Storage and data transfer are included in the monthly price, unlike EC2 where it costs extra. I’d only use it if you like AWS or want the comfort of using a very big company though - performance is notably worse than a provider like GreenCloudVPS or Hetzner.
I’m not affiliated with any of these companies. This is just my personal experience :)
I forgot to mention - stay far away from SSDNodes. Their prices look good, but they massively oversell their RAM. They use ballooning (virtio_balloon) to overallocate RAM, and require you to use their customized Linux distro images that have it enabled. Ballooning means that they take unused RAM from your VM and lend it to other VMs to use. If you try to use all your RAM, they shut down your VPS.
GreenCloud, HostHatch, and RackNerd all let you install whatever OS you want, by mounting an ISO, connecting to the VPS via VNC, and going through the normal setup process just like you would on a regular computer. They do have pre-built images, but I always prefer to install from my own ISO so I know that the installation doesn’t have any non-standard modifications.
Thankfully, most VPS providers don’t oversell RAM or disk space.
I may need to do a proper write up on that one, as it’s quite a long story actually. The main thing is, though: it’s hard to believe how actually good modern hardware is. You can do a lot with a Raspberry Pi, not to say Mac mini. Over the decades, I accumulated some old hardware which serves till it would break. And then I’d replace it with similar hardware, I guess. E.g. I have a media server, which is a simple lighttpd web server running on an obsolete Intel Atom computer. It’s slow, but it does its job at serving files. I have old MacBook Pro hosting my Immich library.
All that is rather a self-hosted territory, but I’m pretty confident I can host a production grade stuff off my own hardware. I have been using the cheapest options at DO/Hetzner, so I definitely can host off a maxed out Mac mini or similar.
All that lives at home, or in the office (I am allowed to have some hardware there). I think the main restriction is the gigabit internet… but hey! That’s plenty too!
If I’d ever come to some serious level of hosting, yes, I think I’d co-locate at some data centre. I see very little need in cloud services, as all I need can be done with the bare metal. And it’s so much fun! Feels like magic, seeing an old laptop you’d throw out otherwise, serving as what would be a full-blown server just two decades ago.
Definitely true. The Pi 5 is especially powerful compared to older versions, but it can get kinda expensive once you add things you’d want for a server, like a case, SSD hat, etc.
Ex-office mini and small form factor PCs (Lenovo Tiny/ThinkCentre, HP ProDesk/EliteDesk, Dell Optiplex, etc) can be a better deal than a Pi. In the US at least, you can often find 9th or 10th gen Core i5 systems for less than $150 on eBay. Works great as a server.
A lot of companies have a 3-4 year refresh cycle, after which the hardware is fully depreciated (essentially meaning its value to the company is $0) and they have e-waste companies collect them. The e-waste recyclers test them, refurbish the ones that still work, and list them on marketplaces like eBay.
Well, they did have that datacenter burn down a few years ago, so.not entirely boring.
But they’ve been an otherwise solid provider for me. I’ve been using their services for years. Started with VPS and now on a bare metal server. Older hardware but great fornwhat i use it for. Been nothing but pleased with them.
That sounds like terrible reliability. If my home lab had an outage like that I would shut it down as I clearly don’t know how to run a dependable system. 😅
Sigh time to find a new vps host for my projects
Anyone have any recommendations?
Hetzner Cloud
I use GreenCloudVPS for a bunch of things. They used to have VPSes starting at $15/year for 2GB RAM and 20GB disk, but their current budget deals are still good (starts at $25/year for 4GB RAM and 35GB disk). These are on older hardware (mostly AMD EPYC Rome Zen 2 systems, ~5 years old) which is why they haven’t been affected by increased RAM and storage prices yet. https://greencloudvps.com/billing/store/budget-kvm-sale
They also have “premium” plans which are newer (AMD EPYC Milan Zen 3 or Genoa Zen 4, and PCIe 4.0 NVMe storage in RAID10): https://greencloudvps.com/billing/store/premium-kvm-sale
HostHatch is good too. Their regular pricing aims to compete with Hetzner, but in 13 locations worldwide. https://hosthatch.com/products. They do sometimes have sales on LowEndTalk with pricing similar to GreenCloud’s “premium” plans.
RackNerd sometimes have good deals, although they’ve discontined quite a few of them recently. You can use https://racknerdtracker.com/ to see currently active deals. I still see a 2GB RAM + 35GB storage deal for $35/year for example.
I suspect all the very cheap ones (<$50/year) will eventually increase pricing. GreenCloud and HostHatch own all their hardware. Right now they use older hardware that’s already reached break-even, but all hardware needs to be replaced eventually, and the replacement cost for things like enterprise SSDs is a lot higher than it was in the past.
If you want to stick to big names, OVHcloud and Hetzner both have pretty good VPS pricing. OVH runs theirs on very old hardware like Haswell (2014/2015 era) Xeon E5 CPUs which is the main reason why they have cheaper pricing that Hetzner.
There’s also AWS Lightsail that’s essentially Amazon’s version of a VPS. Storage and data transfer are included in the monthly price, unlike EC2 where it costs extra. I’d only use it if you like AWS or want the comfort of using a very big company though - performance is notably worse than a provider like GreenCloudVPS or Hetzner.
I’m not affiliated with any of these companies. This is just my personal experience :)
Thanks for sharing
I forgot to mention - stay far away from SSDNodes. Their prices look good, but they massively oversell their RAM. They use ballooning (
virtio_balloon) to overallocate RAM, and require you to use their customized Linux distro images that have it enabled. Ballooning means that they take unused RAM from your VM and lend it to other VMs to use. If you try to use all your RAM, they shut down your VPS.GreenCloud, HostHatch, and RackNerd all let you install whatever OS you want, by mounting an ISO, connecting to the VPS via VNC, and going through the normal setup process just like you would on a regular computer. They do have pre-built images, but I always prefer to install from my own ISO so I know that the installation doesn’t have any non-standard modifications.
Thankfully, most VPS providers don’t oversell RAM or disk space.
Hetzner was good for me, but I went all-in on bare metal, with no looking back.
Hetzner recently skyrocketed the pricing of their VPS offerings.
How did you do that, self host? Co-locate?
I may need to do a proper write up on that one, as it’s quite a long story actually. The main thing is, though: it’s hard to believe how actually good modern hardware is. You can do a lot with a Raspberry Pi, not to say Mac mini. Over the decades, I accumulated some old hardware which serves till it would break. And then I’d replace it with similar hardware, I guess. E.g. I have a media server, which is a simple lighttpd web server running on an obsolete Intel Atom computer. It’s slow, but it does its job at serving files. I have old MacBook Pro hosting my Immich library.
All that is rather a self-hosted territory, but I’m pretty confident I can host a production grade stuff off my own hardware. I have been using the cheapest options at DO/Hetzner, so I definitely can host off a maxed out Mac mini or similar.
All that lives at home, or in the office (I am allowed to have some hardware there). I think the main restriction is the gigabit internet… but hey! That’s plenty too!
If I’d ever come to some serious level of hosting, yes, I think I’d co-locate at some data centre. I see very little need in cloud services, as all I need can be done with the bare metal. And it’s so much fun! Feels like magic, seeing an old laptop you’d throw out otherwise, serving as what would be a full-blown server just two decades ago.
Definitely true. The Pi 5 is especially powerful compared to older versions, but it can get kinda expensive once you add things you’d want for a server, like a case, SSD hat, etc.
Ex-office mini and small form factor PCs (Lenovo Tiny/ThinkCentre, HP ProDesk/EliteDesk, Dell Optiplex, etc) can be a better deal than a Pi. In the US at least, you can often find 9th or 10th gen Core i5 systems for less than $150 on eBay. Works great as a server.
A lot of companies have a 3-4 year refresh cycle, after which the hardware is fully depreciated (essentially meaning its value to the company is $0) and they have e-waste companies collect them. The e-waste recyclers test them, refurbish the ones that still work, and list them on marketplaces like eBay.
Their auctioned baremetal servers are a steal
My guess would be renting a dedicated server, or a home server. It can end up cheaper than colo.
Hosting at home, renting a dedicated server, or colocating are all considered self-hosting.
OVH has been reliable and boring afaik
Well, they did have that datacenter burn down a few years ago, so.not entirely boring.
But they’ve been an otherwise solid provider for me. I’ve been using their services for years. Started with VPS and now on a bare metal server. Older hardware but great fornwhat i use it for. Been nothing but pleased with them.
I thought RackNerd had a better deal for me than digital ocean
I’m looking at Linode currently
They’re reliable, but overpriced for what you get, especially after the Akamai acquisition. Akamai are not known for affordability :)
Check out Linode, it’s easy to use, reasonably priced, and as far as I know, hasn’t done anything disgusting.
Only downside is that they were acquired a little while ago by a publicly traded company, so the likwlyhood of enshitification is higher.
Linode? You mean Akamai Connected Cloud?
Whatever their rebrand is these days lol.
Same same, sucks as they seemed neutral but boy do they not seem to care about appearances.
I use Contabo, decent price for a solid VPS. Have only had 12hrs~ of downtime once in the 6 or 8 months I’ve been a subscriber.
That sounds like terrible reliability. If my home lab had an outage like that I would shut it down as I clearly don’t know how to run a dependable system. 😅