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Comment by z3t4 | Hacker News Reader

You could rent a couple of 1USD/month VPS, or if really on a budget rent a bunch of containers with ipv6 for just a few cents

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You absolutely could. But you wouldn't learn how to build a system that recovers from yanking a power or network cable, wouldn't own it, and wouldn't be able to run it on your terms. You'd need a credit card with an American-run payments network to operate, with a declared identity and a bank account, for which a prerequisite is a few months of stable living and income in a particular jurisdiction, itself something large portions of the world do not have access to. Further you'd need to be happy with the fact none of your data was in your country, under your physical control, and never would be. But feel free to ignore the rest of the world and the fact that all this rental crap runs on open source software, just throw in the towel and be a rent-payer: a strategy that has its perks and efficiencies, for sure. But don't discourage those who seek to learn more.

This sounds like some kind of fantasy; how many people without stable living conditions or without a bank account that can be processed by the US are concerned with...cluster computing?

"What about all the homeless Iranian Ferrari owners!" doesn't seem like much of a rallying cry.

Surely if there is even 1 unbanked person in existence that is interested in cluster computing, then this is a worthwhile endeavour.

No, absolutely not.

Or maybe to Don Quixote, but he was famously delusional.

Is there any number of unbanked people showing interest in cluster computing that would change your opinion?

I "show an interest" in space, but I'm not entitled/deluded enough to expect someone to deliver a shuttle to me, because that would be a waste of time/materials/energy/money.

It's the same here.

If you had spoken to people in the 1960s and told them how many transistors we would have on a chip in 2020, they probably would have called you delusional.

Also you are comparing a space shuttle to a few raspberry pis, hardly apples with apples.

https://ipv6onlyhosting.com/ is the first result, and accepts payment by bank transfer.

Many other small VM hosts accept payment by Bitcoin.

Someone needs to invent a way to drop things off your desk onto a power switch via ssh.

> You'd need a credit card with an American-run payments network to operate, with a declared identity and a bank account, for which a prerequisite is a few months of stable living and income in a particular jurisdiction,

None of this is true.

Try being from a random South Asian or African village. Tell me how you go buying cloud services with your nonexistant banking infrastructure and personal credit line.

The physical location of a person isn't generally the key barrier to being unbanked; instead it's poverty.

"The most common one was having too little money to use an account. Two-thirds cited this as a reason for not having a financial institution account, and roughly a fifth cited it as the sole reason. Cost and distance were each cited by about a quarter of those responding to the question, and a similar share said they do not have an account because a family member already has one. Lack of documentation and distrust in the financial system were both cited by roughly a fifth of adults without a financial institution account, and religious concerns by 6%."

https://www.cashmatters.org/blog/globally-17-billion-people-...

(And to state the obvious: poverty is also a barrier to owning physical infrastructure)

No, try buying cloud services while living in a remote village where clothing is non-existent.

One issue I have with going the VPS route is that what I'm charged is often not what I'm expecting. I will use estimation calculators and figure my bill will be $25/month (which I get for a couple months) and then suddenly get a $120 bill. This has happened more than once and has had me loose all confidence in these services for hobby projects. I'd rather just buy a Pi cluster at this point.

Your agreement was $25/month, so if they start to charge you $120 you pay them $25 and then cancel the service. This is very annoying but do happen dealing with unscrupulous businesses. Although if they have 500% margin eg. you pay $5 for something you can get for $1 elsewhere they will care more about keeping you as a customer. Compared to for example a cloud bill, renting a VPS is both cheaper and more predictive. If you are however paying $25/month you should start looking at dedicated servers, where all resources are preserved for you.

Sounds like AWS or one of the big guys. The smaller providers usually have an all in price for a VPS with a fixed amount of rosources, no surprises. Lightsail is similar but kind of sucks.

Yeah, it's AWS. In the future I'll be looking at the smaller providers.

From my experience the cheapest reliable ones in terms of storage, cpu, ram performance come at about 3$/month (+-50 cent). I can recommend Hetzner.

Any links to an ok $1 VPS that would work? I tried a few a while back and always have an issue with RAM.

What's the best way to go about clusters since I think you need 1gb RAM per node and lowest I've seen is $5.

Thanks

Where does one find VPSs this cheap?

A few years ago I could vouch for LowEndBox: https://lowendbox.com/. I've not frequented the site in a very long time though, so can longer be sure.

RamNode has some starting at $15/year on their OpenVZ platform. Have been happy enough with that for several years now, although it's quite limited as to what it can do in terms of performance. But as another commentor mentioned, check out LowEndBox. It's where I discovered this.

https://www.serverhunter.com/

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