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Comment by raybb | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have tips for managing/monitoring a few cheap VPS? I have one that I pay $4 a year for and only use it as a Syncthing middle between my laptop and phone. I also have a few other small ones that I use for single purposes. However, I don't have a good way to see how much storage is on each VPS and the CPU utilization without sshing into them to check.

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I would use telegraf (https://github.com/influxdata/telegraf) to gather the metrics you want from your servers. It has built-in functions to get metrics like disk usage, cpu, etc...

From there I would export those metrics to a grafana+influxdb setup. But honestly this is because that's what I'm used to professionally. There might be simpler solutions around.

https://github.com/netdata/netdata

If you're happy not having a home-grown open source solution, New Relic is essentially free if you don't have many servers and turn off extended metrics. If you start adding in more integrations, it's gonna cost you, but for basic monitoring and nice graphs hosted externally from your systems itself, it works nicely.

https://opsverse.io/observenow-observability/ ...As close to free as possible since the cost is primarily driven by amount of ingestion. Works great for small setups with scope to grow over time!

Disclaimer: I work there

Highly recommend https://hetrixtools.com.

I use cockpit but maybe too much:

https://cockpit-project.org/running

I use cockpit widely as well. I too was initially concerned that it may be an overkill as well, but it solves so many more administrative problems than just metrics, that I’ve found it’s worth the few extra resources used.

https://github.com/MichaelBelgium/VPS-Monitor

where can I get a VPS for $4/year?

I could use one for things like remote cronjobs.

https://cron-job.org/en/faq/

   How much is the service of cron-job.org?
   Our service is entirely free of charge.

( Some resource limits apply )

How come its free?

Some people like helping others even if there's nothing in it for them. Like icanhazip.com

I use them and they are great. But I need longer timeout settings.

You can find Frantech servers for as little as $3.50/year here:

https://my.frantech.ca/aff.php?aff=3460

This is the parent company of BuyVM. They have a very good reputation, but their stock goes up and down throughout the month. If you want a specific data-center location, wait until the first of the month when stock replenishes.

The servers at this affiliate link start at $3.50/month. Am I missing something? What service is $3.50/year?

Not sure about $3.5/year, but Hosteon has servers at $16/yr (openvz) and $21/yr. Small companies on LEB have yearly prices occasionally, and frequently they never disable the sign up page for them, for example:

$1/month list: https://lowendbox.com/blog/1-vps-1-usd-vps-per-month

Vultr

As I said above I had a bad customer service experience with them. I've used a lot of hosting providers and Vultr was the most ghetto-feeling by far. Back to Digital Ocean for me, or if they stop hosting custom images, I'll try and find another

I bought it from VirMach on Cyber Monday back in 2017. It was a pretty good deal and they've stuck to it. I've barely used the box for anything over the years but it's nice to have.

I think you'll still find deals like this on lowendbox occasionally.

Original deal: https://lowendbox.com/blog/cyber-monday-virmach-vps-deals-as...

I have heard Nagios works well for monitoring.

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