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Comment by zeagle | Hacker News Reader

Until recently I had a 4gb ram 80gb ssd+2tb hd VPS running debian in a Montreal data centre with a real use 700 mbit pipe to my city with a budget provider for the equivalent of $80USD/year. When fio speeds were slow they moved me to a less crowded server. I gave it up as don't need it and moved my personal sites back to NFS for peanuts a year and services to my NAS. The pricing, offsite storage for my backups, Canadian sovereignty, lack of perceived complexity with a big provider was all attractive. I'm a physician with a tech hobby and last serious tech work was in the LAMP days with perl and php. Trying to think of learning about AWS and screwing up usage based billing was daunting!

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Yeah, don't try AWS. I tried it once and now I'm stuck with $0 bill emails coming each month that I can't stop.

A few months ago I was going through my secondary email and noticed I was getting a $0.01 monthly bill from AWS.

Having not used AWS for years, I logged in to check it out, navigated through the Kafkaesque maze of their services until I found what I was looking for:

A lone S3 storage bucket, with one file, "Squirrel.jpg". A 200kB picture of a squirrel that I uploaded 8 years ago and can't remember why.

> I was getting a $0.01 monthly bill from AWS.

I wonder what the cost to AWS was for keeping track of that and running your CC. There's no way they made money off you / that 12 cents/year cost them *at least* 12 cents to collect every year

That's funny. I kept getting a -$100 bill from a credit card for a few months after closing it. Eventually called them and suggested they can send me a cheque instead of a bill next time for similar reasons...

IIRC the CC they had on hand had long expired and they never actually managed to charge me for these minuscule amounts, which is why I didn't notice it for so long.

My vps provider bills in $5 blocks

That should be below the threshold for AWS’s free tier. I have more than that in S3 and I’m not being charged a cent.

AWS did some weird security thing and it invalidated my 2FA. I can't login to my account to update my expired card.

I have $6 in charges and so now my account is locked. Lol. Fuck off AWS.

> Trying to think of learning about AWS and screwing up usage based billing was daunting!

One of the hard rules we learned pre-pandemic was that services attached to usage based billing should really exit on error. It's a lesson I'm keeping in mind working with agents and routing (and the main reason I'm local-first).

Canadian here, could you share the name of the provider? I'd love to move to something more local and just need a basic small vps for a simple apache host. I know of a couple providers but never talked to anyone actually using one.

They're probably talking about ServaRICA. They post deals on LowEndTalk.

Thank you!

It was ServaRICA as someone else suggested. It was a Black Friday hybrid VPS deal from a few years ago, looks like they still have comparable stuff on their site. For the cost I would generally assume anything important needs to be duplicated in case the company folds or a fire unless you pay them for such a service. (I don't have any vested interest in suggesting them.)

Thanks! Nothing important, personal site with the source stored in a git repo replicated to a few places, so them folding would just be a minor inconvenience.

I did a detailed review of a few Canadian VPS providers last year.

https://lukecyca.com/2025/canadian-vps-review.html

Last year, I moved from DigitalOcean to FullHost (their Vancouver datacentre) for hosting a small SaaS and a bunch of personal projects. It's cheaper and FAR better performance.

Thanks! I'll check it out!

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