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Comment by anaphor | Hacker News Reader

I've been using Linode for years and I haven't had too many problems with the service itself. That being said, this makes me think twice about staying with them. If I wanted to switch, is the only real competitor Digital Ocean or are there any other good choices?

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http://oktawave.com and http://vultr.com are said to be good. I haven't used them though, I personally use baremetal servers at Hetzner.

I use vultr to host freebsd servers. Have no problems with it but it is young and it definitely shows. Good host provider to keep an eye on.

Same. I have been using it for a cheap freebsd website instance, for just over a year now. So far, I have needed very little interaction with support, so I can't speak to how good it is.

Vultr is the best I've found. The UI and website isn't as pretty as DO or AWS but:

- It's consistently faster on most metrics than other providers I've tested.

- It's full KVM and allows you to run any OS you like. As long as it's KVM virtualisable and you can install it from an ISO it's an option.

- It's present in a ton of DCs.

Awesome, I'll look into it. I definitely like being able to create my own custom ISO and install it. Thanks!

Why not AWS? They have nano instance types for as little as $5 monthly and infinity more flexibility.

For me, because once you get beyond the $5 nano/free tier, things get expensive really quick.

For example, I run about 10 different sites off one Linode, but only one of them gets any substantial traffic. Still, in order to run that site, which works just fine on a $20/mo 2GB/2core unit on Linode, I'll push out about 150GB in outbound bandwidth a month, and require around 15-20GB in storage. Pricing that out on AWS, ignoring the free tier, I'm looking at at least $40/mo, so double the price.

These are hobby sites or side projects, so they are not necessarily mission critical, but it would be sad if they went down.

There's a serious benefit to getting a VPS when you're on the low end like that, where power and bandwidth per dollar are greatly maximized.

DO box should give you roughly that.

If you're are paying double digits or more for cloud hosting, you'd probably get much better bang for your buck by getting a similarly priced dedicated hosting setup.

The main value provided by cloud hosting is easy scalability, not cheap prices.

Do you have hosts you would suggest? There are so many hosts out there, it's hard to know wheat from chaff (to put it politely).

I'd start out by looking at the OVH offerings, Kimsufi (a part of OVH) has dedis starting from $5 a month in both NA and EU.

You can get a cheap "High Availability" setup for $10 with servers on two different continents.

Oh, and the bandwidth is free. (Although, 100mbit.) You can max that line 24/7 for a month and pay nothing more than $5, on linode that costs twice as much that'd cost $600 just for the bandwidth.

If you need something beefier than Kimsufi, OVH also has their mid-range brand soyoustart (https://www.soyoustart.com/us/essential-servers/) with prices starting at $42 that'll just completely destroy any similarly priced cloud offerings.

I'm only focusing on OVH here because they're IMO as the biggest provider in this market they're also the safest choice. Leaseweb and Voxility might be worth checking out too.

Quick disclaimer: I'm not currently an OVH customer (their DC locations don't fit my use case) nor am I in any way affiliated with them.

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