Can you recommend VPS providers that offer cheap/reasonable plans with big storage?
SSD is not needed for this.. I would even prefer conventional HDDs if that saves money/offers more storage. Processing power and RAM should also be secondary as long as it's enough to scale images in a reasonable time.
I use LetBox for some projects and have been happy with them. Their high-storage plans go up to 10TB disk at $48.30/mo. In my experience their disk performance isn't stellar, but for lots of use cases it's more than adequate. Note that LetBox explicitly disallows media piracy on their servers (not your use case, but that's the context in which a lot of folks seek out high-storage servers). https://my.letbox.com/cart.php?a=confproduct&i=2
There's also WalkerServers. They rent out bare metal servers by the month, going up to 144TB at €255/mo. Their plans are more expensive than LetBox, but you should get better performance since it's bare metal, and if you buy your server in the Leaseweb datacenter, torrenting is allowed. The owner conducts a lot of customer service on Reddit and people seem pleased with his services.
Finally, for your specific use case, I would suggest considering AWS S3, Backblaze B2, or similar. Local disk space could easily be a limitation for folks looking to self-host image space; I have a friend with multiple TiB of images in Google Photos he's looking to move somewhere else. I have 30GiB of photos, which rules out lots of cheap VPS plans. Lots of folks also won't spring for more than the cheapest VPS plan they can get, or they'll load up your software on an old computer with modest storage. Local storage also makes your users responsible for backups/disk failures for some of the most important data they own, and most users really don't implement backup well. Putting the photos into a highly-durable, infinitely-scalable, cost-effective object store with push-button backup/versioning settings carries a lot of advantages for this sort of project. It doesn't have to be either/or -- you could support both -- but I definitely suggest supporting object stores.
I agree that there certain limitations with local disk space. However one of my main objectives was to get my data away from cloud infrastructures. It sure is different to just put your photos on Google Images or pay for cloud storage which you access from your service.
Still I want to have full control over where and how my data is stored and I want a simple platform (at least for now, this is an MVP). So yes I agree that cloud storages have a clear value proposition but it is only an option for the future.
I also intend to at least offer some tools/reminders for backups. In the end it is the user's responsibility. Beside self-hosting on rented hardware I also think about putting a real box into my basement. This is obviously only a sensible solution for sharing in a small circle. But that's what my project was intended for.
I will again have a look at LowEndBox and also LetBox.
https://www.serverhunter.com/ is a solid site for searching for providers, much easier than using LEB.
BuyVM https://buyvm.net/ are my go to provider. Been using them for years and they are probably one of (if not the highest) ranked providers on LEB/LET. The recently upgraded all their nodes to Ryzen 3900X's and NVME SSD's.
Their block storage is stupid cheap at like $5 per 1tb - https://buyvm.net/block-storage-slabs/
You should be extra careful on big servers with little bandwidth, you might need a month to fill/empty/rebalance them.
How will you host the images ? Metadata will become a bottleneck before hdd size.
Check out https://github.com/chrislusf/seaweedfs
I don't think metadata will be a bottleneck in this scenario.. but maybe I am just naïve here.
I also consider just running a small box in the basement with dynamic dns instead of using a VPS.
Could you provide more details on this? Are you saying accessing the metadata will be a bottleneck (via E.g., a relational database)?
>> You should be extra careful on big servers with little bandwidth, you might need a month to fill/empty/rebalance them.
Also, what do you mean by fill/rebalance in this context?
It's the problem of having too many small files. Explained here https://github.com/chrislusf/seaweedfs#introduction.
> Also, what do you mean by fill/rebalance in this context?
Assuming you are replicating the data. You have to be careful of cascading failures if repairing replication is too slow because of slow network/disk-io/cpu.
If you need on-line storage, such as for a database, then consider AWS with a big EBS volume or Digital Ocean's Volume Block Store.
All of these can be used with the smallest/cheapest VPS instance types... so you can pay $2/month for a micro-sized EC2 reserved instance and attach a lot of storage. A downside to this is that most providers top out at 16TB, which might be a scaling problem depending on what your business is. Even small image hosts are in the multi-petabyte range.
OVH, Hetzner or ScaleWay. Apart from Hetzner they other two also offer VPS as well.
Granted I'm in Japan, but I get like 1/12th the speed I do from an Scaleway dedi in France.
For the traffic flowing from Hetzner to your ISP it's under the control of Hetzner which upstream provider they choose - and the choice might be sub-optimal right now. If the bottleneck is in the other direction you have to pester your own ISP about it.
Cheap / Affordable, Semi / Fully Managed, High Spec ( CPU / Memory ), Connection Speed ( Latency and Bandwidth ), Data Allowance ( Actual Data you could use for your port ), Server / DC reliability, Support, Side Features ( Managed DB, DDoS, Backup Storage, CDN etc.. ), etc
Pick a few, but no host in the world is going to offer all of them. Generally speaking good Connection / route around the world are exceptionally expensive. So if that was a consideration in the first place ( Which the OP never mentioned and I assume it is not important ) you should not be looking for anything that looks "cheap".
Few years ago I thought OVH could have a shot at it, but it becomes increasingly clear they dont have much of that ambition or direction. Hetzner is even more conservatives and only wants to operate in Europe.
B2 also offers a compatible S3 API and it's something like $.005/Gb/Month.
I currently use their 9.99 EUR/mon plan with 2 TB storage for my Nextcloud installation.
Of course - at some point you will need more space and performance, and dedicated Hetzner (or similar) will be a better value-for-money option to continue with.
Pay Backblaze for uploads + storage. Free download + distribution via Cloudflare.
Will scale with you.
In any case one should never forget that RAID is not the same thing as backup (which applies to a lot of not quite RAID solutions as well).
c.e. minimum extra $2/mo. for their cheapest VPS (required)
Their cheapest plan is 30 BRL (about 5.50 USD) for 1 GB or RAM and 50 GB of storage.
If I can get 10 to 300 GB for something between 5 to 50 Euro I'd be happy.
Depending on the use case you can mount an S3 bucket as local storage or integrate with the API and serve the images directly from there (either via one-time tokens or using hard to guess UUIDs).
If you want others to setup their-own quickly, you also need to consider providing some CloudFormation, Terraform, etc.