Ask HN: Personal Server Recommendations

I made a move around 10 years ago. My needs were simple - email and html. But where I was going was hardly internet friendly.

I may get a kicking for saying this, and it may not be your need but may fit the needs of some other HN users viewing this (shared hosting options often get criticised); I have found Dreamhost, over these 10 years, able to consistently work well for my three needs: IMAP, SSH and hosting HTML files (FTP too). They're sufficiently big to stay in business, while sufficiently small to fly under the radar of country or corporate based firewalls.

These days I have a DigitalOcean instance. Maintaining a server securely is a full time job. You seem OK with that - a lot of people may not be - so just dropping this 'droplet' in with the mix.

Dreamhost in my mind is associated with horror stories, but I've never used them.

I have a few personal VPS servers, but still do all my email, static site hosting, and DNS etc through ASmallOrange. For $50/yr I don't have to think about those three things.

Cool, they look great.

Yeah, ASmallOrange is another one I forgot about. Thanks!

My brother convinced me to move to Dreamhost a couple of years ago after giving up my Bytemark dedicated host (Atom). I haven't had cause to regret and he's been with them much longer. The unlimited hosting tariff is really good.

Usually I'd recommend OVH's budget line called Kimsufi [0] but unfortunately they completely split it off the OVH brand a few months ago which means there's no support mail/ticket support any more. Just a forum [1] which two mostly absent OVH support people are supposed to deal with customer support (You don't have a private way of contacting them, you just have to post your nick handle/order number and hope they'll stumble upon it.

To get a better picture of how low budget their whole operation is: It's currently impossible to download PDF invoices. They are working on a fix since February 2014 now. [3]

They also say it'll be ready to go in 120 seconds (according to their order page), what they don't tell you is that you have to go through "verification" which takes about 3 weeks (You have to scan some documents, utility bill,...). Once you are verified you are allowed to order (It's possible to order before and then your order is stuck. But that's another story.)

I actually ordered two servers a month ago and the order is still "processing" and the other one is "processing payment" (Which is apparently a manual process).

So if you actually want storage and a decent powered server I'd suggest to look elsewhere or try their higher priced lines [2]. (Apparently they come with support).

The good thing about OVH is that they offer a lot of linux images out of the box.

[0] http://www.kimsufi.com/en/

[1] http://forum.kimsufi.com/

[2] http://www.soyoustart.com/en/

[3] http://forum.kimsufi.com/showthread.php?22440-Malformated-PD...

The support has become awful. At least, what you can see in public is. The "forum support" makes it quite transparent what to expect. Also, it makes it quite transparent with what kind of sysadmins you share your hosting location (and network infrastructure). Personally, I decided that the risk of not getting support for the duration of a whole week, and the fact that there is no SLA whatsoever, wasn't worth the price advantage. I have some friends and private projects plus my own mail setup on my server and I wasn't comfortable with the idea of staying there. Other hosters are only a tiny bit more expensive and provide better support. OVH's own so-you-start line of servers has SLA and much better support, so it isn't even needed to leave OVH (which I did nevertheless, though).

OVH is also an annoying source of WP comment spam and email spam. Their network is a frequent flier in my blackhole list. I'm probably not the only one.

Personally, I use 3 independent providers (Debian on all):

- prgmr.com ~$10/mo US.

- digitalocean.com ~$5/mo US.

- binarylane.com.au ~$5/mo Australia. SSD 512MB/20GB/100GB transfer. Very nice remote "console" access; takes a couple days to remove ssh/smtp egress filtering.

The ramnode.com OpenVZ-based RAID10 SSD-Cached service might give you the extra storage you need at a good price point.

I completely forgot about http://prgmr.com/. Thanks for bringing it up.

I can't see a way to get more than 256Gb storage on the Ramnode service you mention?

Personally, I use an OVH/Kimsufi server. 10 Euro/mo for AtomD425 CPU, 4GB Ram and 2TB HDD, 100Mbit/s, 4 IPs.

I use it as backup and online storage, to host a few small shitty websites (behind cloudflare) and used to use it as a minecraft server.

While the CPU is a lot weaker than something like digitalocean, I generally need memory and storage a lot more.

Seconded! Happy Kimsufi customer here. I have a few DigitalOcean droplets for customer sites, but after checking the stats and almost never seeing the CPU(s) spike over 50% (if that much) I bought a Kimsufi with 1TB storage and 16GB (non-ECC) RAM and it way outperforms the DO droplets' response time for static assets. I now use it as a static file server for the DO Droplets, plus personal storage.

The network speeds are great and constant, DDOS protection included as standard, and I'm on Gigabit fiber plus close to France so couldn't be happier.

The non-ECC RAM could be a problem over time, but I keep multiple redundant backups and test them regularly, so the small chance of data corruption would only be a nuisance.

Also, the next level up as far as hardware quality is the 'So You Start' range, so look at that too. Depends on your budget and proximity to their French or Canadian data centres.

Woah. 1 TB in their second tier. This looks great for a file server. Thanks!

I use Ramnode to play around in. Cheap and they have pretty good support. Whenever I need help I just send in a ticket and they usually respond instantly, even on weekends. Also ton of flexibility with your machine. Can install any linux distro and do whatever you want on it.

Another recommendation for Ramnode, love them.

For your storage needs you might be better looking for an OVH/kimsufi deal for a cheap Atom server.

Also, haven't used their storage plans but VPSDime have large disk VPS that work out about half the cost of AWS S3.

Another vote for Ramnode. Fast, reliable, and cheap. Nothing has gone wrong with my 3 instances in 14+ months.

For VERY small use cases I would recommend a VPS, however because you're suggesting that you want a lot of storage then I would recommend at least a dedicated server but I would keep buying your own hardware in the back of your mind. I'll talk about this below.

VPS: If you're suggesting hosting a few websites and a small amount of email then a VPS is fine. Prometeus is my favourite for reliability and price. However bare in mind that with a VPS you're host can look into your files whenever they like (mounting the image/device if Xen/KVM) and just entering your container if it's OpenVZ. So for sensitive data I don't recommend a VPS. Also you may be put under restrictions if you max out your CPU and memory usage for long periods of time.

Dedicated Server: This is good for large storage and if you want unrestricted CPU and memory usage. You can obviously virtualize your own servers onto this and you can also run Windows and Linux (+ OS X). This has all the benefits of having your own physical box/colocation plus you get free hardware replacements.

Own hardware: If you're happy with just relying on your network connection then you can host it at home with a small quarter rack and just put a rack mount server in there. There are some benefits with this. If you're just torrenting, hosting email and a light web server or even just for testing you can get an old server off eBay or craigslist for next-to-nothing and you have the benefits of owning the hardware and putting in as many HDDs as you like. If you're coloing then you also get a very good network connection and reliable uptime, and a public-facing IP address. Oh and having your own physical hardware is cool, and colocation is even more cool and fun to do!

I don't have any experience with colocation, but it's incredibly interesting to me. I actually love the idea of having my own hardware. I actually was searching for storage units that had network drops (couldn't find any). The noir lover in me gets off on the idea of a 5x5 storage unit with just a small 4U cabinet against the back wall.

How does one get started with colocation?

It's as simple as doing a search for 'data center near X'. Call up their sales office, and ask them how much per month for ping, power, and cooling. You may also be able to find VARs that lease out racks 1 or 2U at a time for cheap as well. Shop around, there's HUGE variance in pricing in this space. It also couldn't hurt to let the salesdroids know you're shopping for best price as well. I doubt there's a ton of wiggle room for a handful of U, but if you're talking a half rack or more they're generally willing to begrudgingly work with you on price.

File Server, way back when, when I used to torrent the main place to get a server was OVH. As far as I know that's still hotbed for that sort of server. Pretty cheap and tons of space.

Digital Ocean are pretty kickass for a test server. I moved to them from Rackspace Cloud who again are pretty kickass.

Kimsufi (which is a "budget" dedicated server brand from OVH) is great, just don't download movies/music from public trackers like thepiratebay. A few DMCAs and they'll shut you down. Private trackers are fine (not Demonoid tho, if that's still even a thing). Foreign movies/music/anime from public(-ish) trackers should be fine. I used to host a huge FTP repository that was only accessible from my university's campus network there and never had any problems. Please be aware though that Kimsufi uses really cheap hard drives (Maxtor) that have a tendency to fail under high load (torrents). I ran a ZFS mirror across multiple drives, so wasn't much of an issue for me. Just don't get a server with only one drive and no backups.

I should add that ZFS has some sort of weird IO overhead that has a tendency to quickly chew through most very cheap hard drives. If you use a different filesystem (I wouldn't), ymmv. Typical support turnaround for a failed drive at Kimsufi is around 2 hours.

Do they allow torrent linking? I just want to host magnetic links and not the data

You can get a VPS for the playing around stuff, but storage is very expensive. For that I would recommend to get something like a Synology/Qnap/Drobo and ask to stick it in the basement of a friend. Unless you constantly load stuff on and off it they will hardly notice that it's there.

Another thumbs up for Digital Ocean. They even have a web-based terminal in case you're not at a machine that has your SSH keys. I have one of their $5/month plans and it seems faster than my old AWS micro instance.

Also, check their twitter account. They often post coupon codes.

Ditto, I've had a DO box for a few months now. I use it for hosting personal projects via GitLab, and it's been stellar. They even had a pre-configured droplet :)

Can you run GitLab on a $5 box?

I'm doing so: http://gitlab.duncanmsmith.com/public/projects

My actual site is hosted on GH Pages, so I don't need that much power to host GitLab itself - 20GB storage and 1TB transfer is more than enough for me.

Well, I have used Linode but then switched to Digital Ocean, since it was much cheaper and only needed a small server.

Recently I got a Cloudatcost offer which is a once in a lifetime payment, with the 50% discount offer. I got 2 servers in cloudatcost, a Developer1 and a Developer3.

Wow, never heard of these guys (cloudatcost). Seems legit.

I've been using Digital Ocean for a little over a year, and have had a great experience. Highly recommend them.

Yeah, I love DO - sort of split between them and Linode for the test server. Really dig the idea of Cloudatcost's one time payment though.

Wow, I hadn't heard of CloudatCosts either, I can't find any information about managing your server, can you pick any image you want? what's the dashboard like? support for custom kernels?

The dashboard is simple, power on/ power off the server and info about the ip, root password (which you should disable anyway) and reimage.

You can choose between Debian, Ubuntu and CentOS mostly that I remember. No custom kernels that I know for now if by that you mean a custom distro image. I guess you could download or compile a kernel from sources, install it and reboot... if you screw up just reimage...

About managing your server, you have ssh access so, total freedom and you can find guides/tutorials everywhere on the internet.

Thanks, that sounds pretty much exactly what I'd expect, if this gets your recommendation (which it sounds like it does) I think I might be sold (I like the idea of pay once.). Much appreciated.

How has your experience been with Cloudatcost? I obviously don't realistically expect my server to be around forever, but it would be nice to get a feel for how stable things have been to decide if it's worth it.

Yet another Digital Ocean customer. I've got nothing but good things to say about them. I also have a box on linode which have been excellent as well.

Digital Ocean does bill per hour which is a nice plus if you want to test things on different OSes for a short time.

I'm using Linode and Digitalocean. IMHO Linode is better (performance and support). I had physical node issues with Digitalocean. It's super cheaper but i'm not feeling comfortable.

I do the exact same thing (I haven't had issues with DO, though). Production code on Linode, staging code on DO. The Linode "premium" is worth it.

Do not forget about Backups. That can easily be the hardest part about the whole project. Sometimes a cheap second server is the easiest approach to that. Arguably, not in the same location.

I myself am quite happy with DomainFactory's JiffyBox Service (http://www.df.eu/). They have recent Debian and Ubuntu images and you pay per 0.02Euros/Hour (smallest box, 3 cores 2gb ram 75gb hdd), which amounts to about 15Euros a month. They also claim not to have a traffic limit :D

PS: Just saw that their website is apparently not available in english. my bad :(

Amazon EC2 offers one free year for a micro instance for first time accounts.

Otherwise, I have been quite impressed with Digital Ocean as well, cheap and FAST.

I use OVH and Ubiquity for dev'ing; with servers in Europe and the US. Both very cheap and cheerful; my aim is to sync/load balance. Just looked at Cloudatcost - sounds great, I'll have to get one of those too!

I don't know about storage.

OVH is always the cheapest!

Check their cheap dedicated servers "so you start":

http://www.soyoustart.com/us/

I like Prometeus.Net, they have good prices and great support. In particular, their XenPower (http://xenpower.com/) line is hard to beat.

I use hetzner.de those are very affordable dedicated machines with 2TB+ and 32GB RAM for 50 euro a month.

Also no dataplan limits, and you can buy more IP addresses for 1 euro/month a piece.

I use digital ocean for hosting my own website. Works pretty well.

go with OVH .