Low-Cost VPS Testing

Give Google Cloud Run a try. Can run any Docker container, and billing is per request. It is basically a fully managed knative.

https://cloud.google.com/run

My side projects all run for free.

(I work for Google Cloud)

Have you tried running Dokku[0] on a VPS?

[0] https://github.com/dokku/dokku

I do CapRover + FaaS on the small $5 droplet on Linode. I run a lot of random stuff out of it, with the only change from me being increasing swap from 512MB to 2GB (it's all SSD backed anyways).

If you feel like contributing Rust support to https://github.com/piku, it would be great. ;)

Maybe openfaas, kubeless, or knative on DigitalOcean's managed K8S? Note that Linode has managed K8S in beta now, so there's another cheap K8S option.

I don't see PaaS as a realistic alternative except for the simplest of apps. One always eventually needs to tweak the web server to get things like websockets, brotli compression, fast serving of versioned immutable files, or something else. Or run several servers with vpncloud.rs between them. It's not price that is a problem, it's the lack of flexibility.

render.com is a really strong PaaS, quite recent but showing great promise.

Maybe scalingo.com or fortrabbit.com for php?

There is (seems to be) no way to quickly spin up an instance for testing for new customers. After completing the order form I received an email stating they will check my address details and only after that complete the order and let me pay.

They're a provider I haven't heard of before. Following your link, what does "Billing period 6 Months" mean? Elsewhere on the page it says: "Hourly based billing. Tariff can be terminated at any time."

OVH is pretty much useless for anything 'important'.

Worked with a company that had a large spend account with them as part of our VM/VPS offering which was built on top of leased bare metal where OVH was handling all our Roubaix VM/VPS. Without warning they capped every server to 10Mbps. Their explanation was not given to us individually but posted in french on their forums. We only knew what was going on because a francophone customer translated the message for us. We'd gotten lumped in with seedbox hosts and large CDN accounts.

The gist was they didn't want to cater to high bandwidth consumers, something they didn't evaluate as (# servers / BW usage) but by (account / BW usage).

They wouldn't even lift the bandwidth limit to transfer data off the servers. Not even for private traffic. 10Mbps ports for all of them. We had to offer our customers free service in another region or their data.... Choose one.... Just to try and limit the amount of data we moved off.

If they'd given us any warning we'd have been perfectly accepting of them not wanting our business. Whatever they're reasoning, it's a good reason to never consider them for anything mission critical every again.

I'm happy with OVH. But, I do agree that their support isn't always great. However, it's dirt cheap, so I adjust my expectations accordingly.

In the situation you describe, for example, it's not hard to add a new IP address in their admin panel and update DNS.

I don't agree with their policy, but it is difficult these days to run your own outbound mail service and not end up in the spam box.

I gave up and pay for Gsuite as an SMTP smarthost so my outbound email isn't tagged as spam. That allows me to still process the inbound on my server if I want.

Obviously doesn't help the privacy concern if that is your motivation for running your own SMTP.

If, however, cost is a consideration, Yandex is an option. They will host SMTP for your domain at no charge. https://yandex.com/support/connect/add-domain.html (assuming Russian hosting is okay for you)

My only gripe with DO is the stability for some of their regions. Some of them have been solid and only have minor outages, but others like one of the ones in AMS has had intermittent issues. For me their most attractive product is the DO spaces and is a quick drop in for S3.

But in all I like their servers and I go between the guides from DO and Linode to setup services that I’m unfamiliar with.

I've been using BuyVM for about six months, they're the only VPS provider I could find with anycast IP support which is a neat feature to have. I think they're a pretty small operation and in my experience, pretty much all of these low cost VPS providers will terminate if you go a few days overdue on the invoice.

Is that $15/year some old offer or is it still available? Not seeing it on the site.

Also, how is that block storage so much cheaper than anyone else's?

I've been with them for my private mailserver VPS for ~7 years now and the support in IRC and via the ticketing system has always been fast and friendly. The author talks about the KVM/slice setup in the post but they're still dilligently running all the openvz from legacy contracts. You can count on them being around years from now.

I have had the same experience. Used them on and off for years and really like the service, especially for the cost. Just be sure to set a reminder to pay the invoice because they don’t do recurring billing (or at least didn’t last time I used them), and is you don’t pay your stuff is terminated.

Great team tho and always very receptive in IRC.

Have used DO, Linode and Vultr (and some others) for 5+ years but Vultr is the only one that keeps having network problems every now and then.

I run "monit" on all instances that checks for connectivity every minute but maybe every few months or so, I get alerts of network reachability for a slight moment from Vultr instance located in Silicon valley region. It's cool that they accept Bitcoin for payment though.

The page's test of course doesn't test reliability over the years and it seems it's not done 10 times on different instances, and the performance could've randomly fluctuated on the test, so I'd take the results with a grain of salt.

DO has been pretty stable for me. It just keeps running with no interferance.

Linode sometimes (like once a year) makes your instance unavailable for a tiny moment for maintenance but they provide you with clear explanation beforehand and I think it's good that they actively patch security problems that way.

Also good that they pool bandwidth from multiple instances, so even if your small instance takes lots of bandwidth, if you got some other instances, it can consume the limit from those too as a single pool.

Another for Linode is that they release OS images so fast as in they had CentOS 8 image the day I read the news it was released. I checked the others but only Linode had it then.

I have been happy with binarylane hosted in Sydney.

I tried vultr ~2 years ago and at least then they did not have their own ubuntu repository mirror. All the package manager downloads were painfully slow. Digital Ocean and binarylane mirror the repo and any package can be pulled pretty much instantly and it makes the initial setup much more pleasant.

+1 for Vultr. Not in NZ but we've been using them for various app / database servers for coming on four years now and we have literally only ever had one minor issue. Their support is through ticketing only (AFAIK), but their support team is very fast at responding.

I'm in NZ, and Vultr has been awesome for me, although no block storage in Sydney...

AWS is available (with Lightsail as well) in Sydney as well (albeit with reduced bandwidth compared to other regions for the pricing).

Rimuhosting has options for Auckland if interested in NZ hosting. NZD 18, which is about USD 12, for a 2G option with 15G bandwidth.

> I'm surprised that smaller companies have not moved away from static pricing yet.

The physical server has a fixed set of resources. If you let customers pick what resource they want to buy, you'll run out of one resource before the rest, leaving the server underutilized and increasing your costs. You can't sell KVM instances with no ram, no disk, or no CPU.

If you have enough physical servers and small enough customers, you can mostly solve this by carefully figuring out which customers to put on which machines. However, you've created a complicated jigsaw puzzle. And what happens if you need to shift customers between servers to balance things out?

I think Google is able to offer custom machine types because they're big enough, and because they're able to perform live migrations between physical hosts (most hosting providers can't do this), so the customer likely won't even notice if they need to be migrated.

Instead, most of these providers offer a few different SKUs to satisfy different use-cases, or they just pick one target market (e.g. lots of disk space for backups or lots of CPU resource for compute) and focus on that. A few offer networked block storage, which gives some more flexibility, but at the (potential) cost of reliability and performance.

> None in Asia though? You need it to be in Taiwan to service the region well!

Bandwidth in Asia is significantly more expensive (https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-costs-around-the-world...), so most budget hosting providers stay away.

There is https://www.serverhunter.com/ but really reviews like this are better because metrics like CPU-core and instantaneous disk speeds won't necessarily tell you about the consistency in network, disk, and CPU performance over a long period, and the supported features. It is not like AWS and Google Cloud where you can expect stable performance.

There is also https://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/ which conducts regular tests and may give a more complete picture.

I'm replying to myself because I just managed to get a IONOS instance running in Kansas City (same distance from east/west-coasts) for low-and-behold 1€/month with unlimited data (18GB SSD and 512MB RAM). How is AWS/GCE going to compete with that?

One gotcha is that if you come from the EU you need to register via ionos.eu and there is a registration fee of 10€ for each instance!

Also looking at VPS in china now, Shanghai is pretty well placed in the Asia region: Edit: VPS is crazy expensive in China (10x-30x more expensive than IONOS and that is without data which also is 20x more expensive!), I suggest using AWS as backup to GCE over there, probably want to stay outside of the firewall in Asia if you use port 80, atleast if your other Asian customers are more important than your China customers to begin with.

Something is off with the prices globally right now, the US is like on a permanent firesale when it comes to non essential goods, but to live there is impossible!?

LunaNode has been great, I just wish they had even one US location or something that wasn't on OVH's network.

chuckled a little when reading the first negative of luna was the absence of having a debian 10 template. i raised a ticket with them about this in july, and have been periodically testing new openstack releases from https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/openstack/current-10/ to see if the issue 'fixed itself' for some reason with debian 10, cloud-init takes around 6 min to raise network interfaces, which is why they haven't released a template yet. not sure if the issue is on lunas side or not.

In my experience Scaleway isn't worth the risk. I had multiple weeks-long periods for different vpses (and both FreeBSD & Linux) over the course of two years where their network-mounted root disks would start throwing errors and then drop offline entirely. Worse, after one of these incidents their control panel usually wouldn't allow a reboot. I went round and round with support and the most they ever did was clear a flag for that and tell me they were experiencing network issues. I've also used Ramnode, Linode, Servercheap, Amazon, Heroku, various small local colo companies over, etc. and Scaleway was the only actively bad one.

Unexpected outages, disk corruption, and usually not even a credit when I'd been up and down for days. If you have problems like that with your infrastructure and they crop up on and off for years, you need to bring in new people and invest in infrastructure. They aren't going to.

IPv6 is a second-class citizen on Scaleway. eg. IPv4 addresses are independent resources that can be assigned to any server (or load balancer), IPv6 are tied to a specific server, and can't be moved to an other one. And their load balancer does not support IPv6.

I'm quite happy with their free tier. I have two Ubuntu machines hosting various docker images.

Network bandwidth seems capped at around 50mbps, but that is perfectly adequate for my needs.

CPU is quite strong, it's two AMD Zen vCPUs. The compile times for a few of my containers was acceptable.

Three downsides:

-No reverse DNS (at least I couldn't get it to work)

-No IPv6

-It's Oracle, I made sure I only used personal info and would never consider it for work purposes.

Linode and Vultr are both KVM-based and both have low cost offerings in Sydney with reasonable amounts of bandwidth (>1TB).

Linode even has GPU instances, though they're extremely expensive (you'd really want to only turn it on while you're using it).

> Oracle's always-free cloud offerings (100GB disk, 1GB RAM, 10TB bandwidth). Interested to hear what people think of this.

It's Oracle; wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole.

In addition to Linode, Vultr, OVH, there are some local home grown "equivalents" Binarylane and Quantum Core, they both have a presence in Sydney, with the former having locations in other cities in AU, BNE, MEL, PER.

Apparently TeamViewer supports headless Linux servers: https://www.teamviewer.com/en/remote-access-headless-linux/

I'm guessing what you're getting at here though is that you want to manage the server through a desktop interface, complete with windows and menus and the like. Most people don't do that on Linux servers because most of the things you need to interact with to administrate one are only accessible through a command line interface.

That said, if you really want to manage a Linux server graphically, you might be able to make it work with something like Xvfb.

I’m not trying to be snarky, but I’m curious, what is it that you like about TeamViewer? I don’t run X on any of my servers, so plain old ssh (and mosh) work well for me. Have you considered the alternatives, perhaps tunnelling VNC/RDP over ssh?

TeamViewer hasn’t had the best track record[1] when it comes to security (compared to something like OpenSSH).

[1]: http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=TeamViewer

Hmm... their largest storage VPS, 8TB, is $1437 USD/yr, which works out to around $15/mo/TB. This is 3x more expensive than Backblaze B2 @ $5/TB/mo. It seems like you'd do better using something like B2 for cloud backups and getting a $5/mo Linode VPS or $2.50/mo Vultr VPS for your other services. I use both Linode and Vultr and like them both.

LowEndBox indeed has great deals once in a while, but it's impossible to navigate. You can't search by specs. If you want a cheap VPS/dedicated server with certain specs, try

https://www.serverhunter.com/

And if you don't mind dealing with the russian UI, try

https://poiskvps.ru/

i would not recommend to look for hosts there. Most (say 90%) of the hosts seen there are hosted on Colocrossing that actually owns both LowendBox and Lowendtalk (forum, thats mostly ran by volunteers)

just today it turns out many of the hosts (20 and still increasing) posted there just suddenly decide to close shop, all at once, with the same email from all of them. This isnt even the first time this has happened, but it is on a larger scale. (you can read more about this on lowendtalk if interested)

Reverse DNS is what maps an IP address to a host name. A PTR-record type is used to store reverse DNS entries. The name of the PTR-record is the IP address with the segments in reverse order followed by ".in-addr.arpa". For example the reverse DNS entry for IP 2.3.4.5 would be stored as a PTR-record for "5.4.3.2.in-addr.arpa". That then points to "somehost.yourdomain.tld".

It's important for things like email, where the receiver can do a reverse DNS lookup to make sure your host is supposed to be sending email from "example.domain". Lacking proper reverse DNS, your outgoing email could be marked as spam. Or rejected outright for one not existing. It's also used for some forms of SPF entries (though that's discouraged).

Last, it's somewhat useful for logs if you have hosts in your domain that connect to each other. Though, usually, you're encouraged NOT to configure apache, syslogd, etc, to do reverse DNS lookups...for performance reasons.