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olegkikin

There are also many less known VPS providers with truly great deals. I've been using these two:

NodeServ: $1.25/month = 50GB HDD, 512MB RAM, 1 core, 1TB bandwidth, location in Jacksonville.

Host.us: $6/month = 150GB HDD, 6GB RAM, 4 cores, 5.12TB bandwidth, location in Dallas.

Both deals found on LowEndBox.

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Your lesser known VPS providers probably have lower tier bandwith, more crowded hypervisors, old virtualization tech or old hardware.

That's not to say getting a 8GB openVZ vps for $4 a month isn't an amazing deal, but just that there are caveats.

I just had a look through their ToS for the catch.

For the most part it's reasonable, but there's a freaking litany of reasonable things you're not allowed to run, including IRC, audio/video streaming, game servers, and so on.

Why on earth do you sell me X block of resources for Y$/month if you're going to tell me what I can and can't do with them? Surely unreasonable use would be covered by resource limits already in place?

There are mainly 2 reasons:

* they oversell, so they assume that only small fraction of web servers will consume 100% of resources, while almost every torrent client will consume 100% of the bandwidth. There is nothing wrong with overselling hosting within a reasonable margin, but most of the people here want to run more than a LAMP stack on the server. * they get too much admin overhead replying to Tor "abuse" letters etc., so they just decided to deal with it in the simplest way possible.

I guess both factors contribute equally.

Most VPS providers already limit the options to run Tor nodes or SMTP servers in one way or another. However forbidding things like IRC and audio streaming is quite unusual and I wonder how oversubscribed their bandwidth must be on these hosts.

I doubt CPU or RAM allocation is the issue here given AWS already have a good CPU time credit system to manage it.

In the old days (90s-2000s), allowing IRC bots opened yourself to being a DoS target and general receiver of harassment complaints from perceived social abuses that happened in the chat rooms. I assume things haven't changed that much.

All major IRC networks hide your IP address when you connect now (mode +x), but I bet the perception still exists. Most of these ToS'es are thoughtless copypasta from other services.. every now and then there's a Show HN from a new hosting company that has absurd nonsense in their terms, and the creator gets suitably chastised for it.

I don't really care. My $6/month deal beats any $5/month deal from the major players, and by a huge margin. I recently tested the internet speed on it, and I got 850 real Mbps out of the promised 1Gbps channel, which is good enough for me. I can give Memcached 1GB of RAM and not worry about killing everything else.

I have a bunch of sites running on it without stepping on each other, and I doubt that would be the case on AWS / Google / DO.

You're telling me that your 150GB HDD beats a 20GB SSD? Even though they're both going to sit at 10GB free for years.

All the critical things should sit in RAM anyway. The SSD will beat the HDD if you read/write to disk heavily. But not if you need space.

If I need an SSD, there are options too, though DigitalOcean is indeed one of the best if you need a cheap US-based server. If the location doesn't matter, EU, Russia, Ukraine have some great deals.

Example: $4.6/month = 40GB SSD, 1GB RAM, 3 cores, unlimited traffic @200Mbps.

https://firstbyte.ru/vps-vds/kvm-ssd/

LowEndBox and LowEndTalk are awesome, been following for years. CyberMonday got me KVM with 8GB RAM for $10.

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