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Comment by TacticalCoder | Hacker News Reader

For 5 EUR / month you can also get a dedicated server (not a VPS) from OVH.

Sure it's only an ATOM N2800 with 4 GB of RAM / 1 TB SSD / 100 Mbit/s bandwith (which is definitely the bottleneck as I've got gigabit fiber to the home).

But it's 5 EUR / month for a dedicated server (and it's got free OVH DDoS protection too as they offer it on every single one of their servers).

I set up SSH login on these using FIDO/U2F security key only (no password, no software public/private keys: I only allow physical security key logins). I only allow SSH in from the CIDR blocks of the ISPs I know I'll only ever reasonably be login from and just DROP all other incoming traffic to the SSH port. This keeps the logs pristine.

Nice little pet these are.

I'm not recommending these 5 EUR / month servers for production systems but they're quite capable compared to their price.

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I was going to recommend OVH too, they have such cheap offerings for VPS too (on the screen in the article, we see that their 4$ VPS has 500MB RAM (probably amazon lightsail), for that same price you get 2GB RAM on OVH VPS I didn't see your 5€/month offer though

I'd think they are fit for production, a few services use them, like Lichess (can see their stack here https://lichess.org/costs )

Oh my bad: OVH is totally fit for production and they've got very good DDoS protection (which you can combine with CloudFlare and whatnots) but...

I just meant that I wouldn't recommend the 5 EUR / month dedicated servers for production: these do not have a big bandwidth and they don't have ECC RAM.

I edited my other post accordingly.

> OVH is totally fit for production and they've got very good DDoS protection (which you can combine with CloudFlare and whatnots)

the very good DDoS protection just seems to null route YOUR ip if it receives more than a certain amount of traffic/second

for me it used to trigger a few times a year from just random internet noise, like a portscan (as no-one other than me knew the host even existed)

> just seems to null route YOUR ip if it receives more than a certain amount of traffic/second

This is not how it works. I recommend you go to the related webpages (just type "OVH antiddos" on Google), the anti-DDoS system is well documented nowadays.

If you _actually_ suffer from "null-routing"-like issues when the anti-DDoS triggers, you might want to get in touch with the support team to escalate the issue.

I have a feeling they may be very interested about this.

A bit off-topic, but thanks for linking that breakdown. I would never have thought that a chess website would cost $400k/y to operate.

This is a great breakdown.

Seeing their single greatest cost line-item being "site moderation" (more than developer salary!) is such a stark reminder of where the real problems running an internet service are.

I have one of those.

They're pretty much worthless. That atom processor hasn't even got support for AES-NI, meaning that all crypto must be done without hardware acceleration.

Basically all traffic (https? ssh? sftp? vpn?) is heavy duty for that procesor for the sole reason of existing.

I can literally see a cpu 100% busy because i'm downloading a file over sftp in another terminal.

Unless you're doing stuff in cleartext, which restricts the acceptable use cases by a lot.

Really, that kind of servers are really toys.

Also, in case of problems the datacenter people will just shut it off, replace it and re-provision it. I had the (single) disk fail on my kimsufi and the OVH people replaced it and rebooted my server to a blank state.

Ok fine, thank you and everything but where did my data go? Who's been handling my data on the PHYSICAL disk?

Really, those servers are barely toys.

Don't get me wrong though: great toys, but TOYS.

Had a similar experience with online.net's dedibox.

Was a customer for years, and one day they said my server had died and gave some excuse that there was no way to physically access the hard drive as it was in a rack of other servers or something along those lines.

So what happens to my data? It can't be recovered but when is it going to be securely destroyed?

I've got something called "Kimsufi 2G" which I've been paying for since 2013. It's only got 2GB of RAM and 500gb SSD, but it's been going strong since then. The same thing runs a small IRC and mumble server for my friend group. I use it primarily for wireguard and hosting random tiny projects.

Works really well, highly recommend it. I don't block traffic from anywhere since I travel a lot. It's interesting to open the nginx logs and see all the automated scans checking me out.

Oracle Cloud gives away an arm vps with 4 CPUs, 24gb ram, and 200gb disk for free.

https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/#always-free

FWIW, if your Free Tier Oracle service seems to go "unused"--which isn't defined as far as I can tell, and the one I use as a DNS server was dinged for being "unused"--you run the risk of it being shut down and you have to restart it, unless you upgrade to a pay-as-you-go account.

This is a new thing as of last week, I think.

Also, Oracle Cloud's management interface is best described as "let's make this as complicated as AWS, but with more 'Enterprise-y' features, but somehow worse in every possible way."

That said, I can't fault Oracle for being Oracle. I knew what I was getting myself into. And their "Always Free" tier is still free. And it does work well enough for my purposes.

Here's what Oracle says:

Reclamation of Idle Compute Instances

Idle Always Free compute instances may be reclaimed by Oracle. Oracle will deem virtual machine and bare metal compute instances as idle if, during a 7-day period, the following are true:

  * CPU utilization for the 95th percentile is less than 10%
  * Network utilization is less than 10%
  * Memory utilization is less than 10% (applies to A1 shapes only)

https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier...

Well, it was a good month with it then, I guess. My ArchArm box isn't really utilized that much.

edit:

  stress --vm-bytes $(awk '/MemAvailable/{printf "%d\n", $2 \* 0.12;}' < /proc/meminfo)k --vm-keep -m 1

And limit CPU use using cpulimit.

Set up a tor relay, you'll be helping others while making sure that Oracle does not your consider your network "underutilized".

  ORPort 9001
  Nickname foobar
  AccountingMax 512 GB
  AccountingStart week 1 00:00
  DirPort 9030
  ExitPolicy reject *:*

They give you 10 TiB of data transfer per month, this will make sure tor never goes above 4 TiB tops.

Great idea actually, didn't even think of that.

I need a Debian package that's a like a "mouse jiggler" for the CPU, a process that will automatically use enough CPU to satisfy Oracle.

Just run a `while :; do :; done` shell script under `nice` (to have lower priority than everything else) and then under `cpulimit` (to have an upper bound on CPU usage), or in a cgroup.

Thanks for that. I gave up too quickly I guess. It would have been helpful if their email warning me included a link to that.

I guess even Oracle is staring down the barrel of IPv4 infertility.

The problem with free tiers however is always free does not mean 'always' free.

And $4/mo does not mean 'always' $4/mo, but it works today and is easily movable in case the terms become unfavorable then what's the problem?

You're correct of course. My devils argument to that however is an increase from 0 to a natural number will always be a larger % increase than 4$ to 10$ etc.

The other argument would be paid for services tend to be setup with the expectation that the price will increase ( inflation for instance ). Where as an always free gives the expectation that it'll always be free and as such a user might specifically design their system to stay within that limit.

I’ve been unable to actually provision one of those, unfortunately.

Try the montreal DC. I got instant provisioning every time I tried (by killing the older instance and requesting a new one) .

Do you know how to change your datacenter? I got provisioned in San Jose and I don’t think there is a way to change it…

Only by creating a new account to another person.

And with a different CC, I think.

Oracle seems to come on top when comparing cheap/free small scale hosting: https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/

GCP is doing the 2GB ARM VM for free, but it has an end date.

> For 5 EUR / month you can also get a dedicated server (not a VPS) from OVH.

Where?

OVH "ECO Kimsufi" offering. Now... You'll need to "refresh" regularly the page for the 4.99 EUR one (I rounded @ 5 EUR but it's 4.99) for they're in demand and often sold out. Or you write a script that monitors the page to see when they're available again.

I had to wait a few days to fetch my last one but I got it. Always do : )

On OVH's website: OVH cloud / Bare metal & VPS / ECO Dedicated Servers.

P.S: back in the days the "Kimsufi" (french for "qui me suffit", literally "which is enough (for me)") used to be part of OVH, then OVH spun Kimsufi out of OVH and then now... Kimsufi are back into OVH (the older Kimsufi servers are still accessed using the old Kimsufi credentials but the newer ones are using the OVH credentials again).

> back in the days the "Kimsufi" (french for "qui me dit", literally "which is enough")

Surely, "qui me suffit".

not 'qui me dit', but 'qui me suffit'

Oops (edited my post to fix it).

Is there a list of all ovh brands? OVH, Kimsufi, SoYouStart, ...?

Check out their kimsufi offering

Fun fact for non french speakers. Kimsufi sounds like "qui me suffit" which is the french for "which is enough for me".

They are there but rarely in stock. Also they start from $6.10 now.

Nowhere aparently. At least not now.

If you check here, you'll see they mention them:

https://eco.ovhcloud.com/fr/compare/

But then when you click on the link you'll see the 4.99 offering and then after a split-second it's removed (because none are available atm).

But really: with some patience anybody can fetch one. Or you "cheat" and you use a script to see when they're available.

In my experience they're easier to fetch "when Europe sleeps" (so, say, at around 3am in France).

Just got one. Also, you can view servers that are NOT available, and see them listed. When they become available, you can order them.

Yes, I was able to snag one ($6.10) about an hour after I first checked, where it was originally disappearing after a split-second for me.

Just a small gotcha for anyone considering migrating off another platform: I only realized after purchase the 100Mbps advertised network bandwidth, versus a $5 Lightsail's advertised ~400-500 that I'm moving over from.

Another update for anyone seeing my parent post later on...

The OVH machine I ordered seems to be less smooth, and I'm simply running into issues. I am performing the same exact steps as I do on a 0.5 GB Lightsail instance, where it works just fine. My workloads just aren't working on OVH. I have run out of patience and am going to cancel and stay with Lightsail.

I was an OVH customer for 4 years and finally had enough and decided to switch. They kept lowering the specs and increasing their prices.

Where on OVH’s site are you seeing servers that cheap? I can’t seem to find anything like that, but I’m also on mobile right now.

SSD? its showing up as 1TB hdd sata

OVH? Make sure to get some geo redundancy going!

Well... Like anywhere else...

OVH had a big fire last year, I think somehow related to how they do things on the cheap. Thats why I made the comment.

Yeah I know why you made the comment, my VPS burned. If you think other providers aren't as cheap as OVH you're probably wrong, and in any case, you should always have an other location redundancy if you're doing something critical.

or a dedicated Raspi 4 at Ikoula, which is not bad speaking about perf/price and Gb-Ram/price

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