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Comment by simon_weber | Hacker News Reader

I'm something of a free tier connoisseur, and recently built an entire project with 13 forever-free tiers. It was more of a personal challenge than a business decision, but it might be a good reference for what's out there: https://www.simonmweber.com/2018/07/09/running-kleroteria-fo...

Some other services not mentioned there that I've used for free recently:

- humio cloud for log aggregation

- nodequery for server monitoring (though its future is unclear)

- braintree used to waive a big chunk of payment fees ($50k?) for startups, but I'm not sure the program exists anymore

Beyond things that are literally free, I'm a big fan of cheap vps providers if your uptime can take it and you can do your own ops. One of my projects makes ~$200/month and is hosted for $6/year on a 256MB vps. Lowendtalk/Lowendbox is the usual place I find these.

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> Was it worth it? Probably not, at least in the context of a side project. Reading pricing docs, planning Dynamo capacity, and setting up a local environment added days to what should have been a weekend project. That said, it was a fun challenge and the result is more robust than my usual vps setups.

I disagree! Learning experience and posting about it aside, almost a year later it's still running at $0pcm?

You, what, doubled to tripled the setup time? And cut annual running cost from let's say $5*12 = $60 (plus taxes over there?) for some cheap but not free tier hunting setup.

Seems that it was worth your while to me. Obviously increasingly so for as long as it can survive (the companies don't fold, or stop the free tier).

Yeah, I suppose it's true that I'm more willing to keep these projects around when they aren't costing me each month. It also makes it easier to toss ideas out and see what's worth actually investing in.

On other hand, I think I'm much lazier when it comes to marketing them since there's no urgency to make a profit.

What OS and distro do you use for a cheap 256 MB vps? Wondering and wishing to play hehe

Have heard horror stories about the cheap VPS offered at LowEndTalk and similar outfits. What's your average up time? and can you recommend any service provider?

Pings from instances to nodequery are 98% on the low end and 99.9% on the high end. It looks like I'm at 500+ days up at impactvps.com, though I used to see cpu and disk degradations somewhat regularly with them. I haven't had any major outages in a few years of use, though one provider went bust recently after an overly-aggressive sale (alpharacks).

I generally run one instance + sqlite and accept the downtime. The next step up might be two vms across two providers + a cheap managed db.

I don't think I have any super strong recommendations. I did become a fan of BuyVM recently due to their $1/month shared sql plan. But, they're apparently they're planning to retire it, which puts them at a similar price point as something like vultr.

Thanks for sharing the insights. Do you think one should stick with $5/month droplets or hit and try the low end VPS?

Depends on the use case. I think the main factors are reliability and security: if it's not a crucial service and isn't handling anything sensitive, then there's no reason to pay more.

I once got a super deal for a VPS that had little resources but 4 (FOUR!) public ipv4 for $12/year.

The company went bankrupt in less than two months. I didn't even bother to wonder why.

It's hit and miss. I got lucky with mine, excellent uptime and good connectivity for $8/year (this offer no longer exists).

They do lag behind in terms of security updates, however. Not something I'd use to store anything of real value in these days of SPECTRE, ROWHAMMER, ZombieLoad etc.

Simon Weber! You are a legend

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