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Comment by bananamogul | Hacker News Reader

That pricing is awful. $4/month for 512MB VPS...eeek.

You'll find much better pricing at RackNerd, DediRock, InterServer, BuyVM, etc. Small indy hosting companies are the way to go. 2GB for $5/month or so is the typical price point.

Any host that offers KVM and allows you to upload your own ISO can run OpenBSD (or FreeBSD, NetBSD, whatever you want).

Check out LowEndTalk or LowEndBox for deals. There are other sites but that's where I shop.

Sure, if you need an API, or if you want to host in one of the less common locations, or if you absolutely must have five nines, then DO or Vultr or Linode or Amazon LightSail can be a good fit. But if you just need a VPS with a control panel in a typical hosting location (Amsterdam, LA, New York, Chicago, Singapore, etc.) then I don't see the point of paying more at one of the big hosts.

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Too many of these low end resellers are unreliable, root your VM and unprofesionally fight with customers in the forums. They are children. Go with one that owns the hardware.

Yeah. Back in ~2011, when I was in high school, I used to sell these kinds of VMs as a host and advertised on LowEndBox. Literally as a minor. I don't really trust any small time host with my data.

Meanwhile I recently migrated a $5 DigitalOcean VM that's been running flawlessly for over 6 years. It was in dire need of an Ubuntu upgrade. I expect this one to keep going for just as long!

Not necessarily. I've been using a couple of RackNerd VPSs for non-critical stuff for a few years now and they have been rock solid. Hetzner and Contabo are also reputable providers with competitive pricing.

I recently migrated from Digital Ocean to Scaleway. Digital Ocean was great but I had to make sure my stack was entirely in the EU in case the US decides to hit a kill switch for some mental negotiation tactic. Pricing and interface and performance are all similar.

All reputable.

No idea why you're being downvoted. I've bought el cheapo LowEndTalk-style VPS specials on two or three occasions and have gotten what I paid for each time. They either sold a microscopic slice of some over-provisioned 15-year-old POS or outright lied to me about specs then argued until I did a chargeback to recover my money.

For app hosting I'd either 1) use cloudflared and a cheap Lenovo Tiny box to host from my house, 2) write something serverless that runs on Cloudflare Workers, or 3) use a real host that isn't 18 months old and run by hucksters in a race to the bottom.

I’ve been using super cheap VPS just for the public static IP. They reverse proxy straight into my homelab.

The wireguard tunnels haven’t gone down after years of no maintenance use.

These cheap resellers are also magnets for spammers, scammers, and hax0rs, so good luck running anything you don't want caught up in a subnet ban.

So just like DigitalOcean then. It's the first ASN I block when setting up a new website or server.

https://urlhaus.abuse.ch/asn/14061 https://threatfox.abuse.ch/asn/14061

To be fair most data center blocks are in ban lists.

> That pricing is awful. $4/month

> Small indy hosting companies ... $5/month or so is the typical price point.

> I don't see the point of paying more at one of the big hosts.

I'm confused. People who are paying $4/mo at the big host should instead save money by paying $5/mo at a small host?

2g vs 512m. Thats $5 vs $16

Someone else already mentioned that you get much more for 1$.

Check out BuyVM 3.50$ plan.

BuyVM is scammy. They offer a "$1" Plan but all locations are out of stock. Tnen they say it's available on cloudvm where the same package starts at $3

The claim that BuyVM is scammy contradicts my experience. I have had excellent customer service from them. Yes, like (say) airline tickets, the demand for their lowest-priced offerings exceeds the supply available at that price point, and if you're not willing to wait, you will pay more. But new supply seems to come online about twice a month when billing cycles expire, and there is a Discord channel ("BuyVMStock") that can alert you when this happens. Me, I'm hanging on to my underutilized server there just because it's so cheap to keep at the ready, and I suppose this is why they have so little availability. But if they were actually scammy there would be much more churn.

Tbf, they could have become scammy. The previous owner , Francesco , recently (less than a year ago?) sold BuyVM because he wanted to focus on a new endeavor.

That being said, BuyVM stock was always low. You had to register on some website were you were told when what you wanted became available.

https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/186062/buyvm-always-out-of...

OVH VPSs are particularly nice for RAM. Something in the 4-5 USD range can give you 4GB. The issue is patience with availability, sometimes it takes a while to get one in the location you want.

OVH doesn't seem to directly support installation of arbitrary images. So installing OpenBSD can be a bit awkward. A relevant search:

* https://searxng.shreven.org/search?q=openbsd+ovhcloud

same impression. When you want to have memory hangry MariaDB to run fast, RAM is most important, and OVH prices are insanely cheap comparing to basically everyone else.

1blu.de offers 8GB memory and 120GB storage for 9€ a month. Also traffic is unlimited and free.

(However it's hosted only in Germany and does not have an API. Also, its SLA only guarantees 99% uptime.)

Lightsail does not offer five nines.

Lightsail also does not offer any form of virtual serial console to access a VM where you've accidentally broken networking or ssh, when even the crappiest lowendbox-tier VM provider generally does. The only way to 'recover' a lightsail VM that's in that state is to export the storage device to full amazon services starting from a $25/mo VM.

Neither does GitHub, and for whatever reason everyone and their cousin uses it still. :)

everyone uses github because everyone uses github. it's relying strictly on social effect right now.

Well yeah, obviously. I think the point was that uptime is not the only concern, and that a service sufficiently attractive in other ways can get people to overlook a lack of reliability.

Uptime is overrated.

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