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Comment by justinmayer | Hacker News Reader

I have yet to find a single VPS provider that offers explicit support for NixOS [1]. As much as I like the idea of NixOS, it's difficult to evaluate its utility when I cannot easily spin up a NixOS-powered VPS and kick the tires. There does not seem to be any support for NixOS on DigitalOcean [2], and the instructions I came across for Linode look daunting enough that I am unlikely to even try [3].

[1]: https://nixos.org/wiki/Hosting_providers_%26_NixOs

[2]: http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digitalocean...

[3]: https://nixos.org/wiki/Install_NixOS_on_Linode

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Pick any VPS provider offering KVM, and they'll likely offer the ability to insert your own boot CD, from which you can install NixOS. I use DireVPS for a small personal server, for example, although you'll have minor issues installing (you'll need to configure the network from the command line before starting to install, as well as specify the network configuration in the NixOS configuration.nix separately).

You can also get NixOS running on EC2, if you happen to have an account: https://nixos.org/wiki/NixOS_on_Amazon_EC2

Or any provider with Docker support.

Do they explicitly advertise KVM or Docker support often?

If they're running one of those, yes. In general, if a VPS provider doesn't tell you what they're running somewhere (it's usually Xen or OpenVZ, KVM's rarer, Docker's a new platform that doesn't really do the same things), you want to stay away from them.

/me mumbles something about DO's "VPS"s

It's not a one click install but it's not too difficult: How to install NixOS on a Linode with an encrypted root partition: http://bluishcoder.co.nz/2014/10/22/install-nixos-on-linode-...

I've set up NixOS on a Linode, and I was surprised how fast and easy it was, that instantly after nearly instantly running that bash script, I had NixOS set up and was ready to upload my configuration, I didn't even need to have a preconfigured image. Setting it up as a mail server, however, wasn't so much fun.

The linode instructions are pretty up to date. Feel free to shoot any questions to @boothead if you give it a try.. *

* source: followed said instructions to get my linode vps running on nixos.

Use Nixops to provision Cloud machines. It support EC2, Hetzner and Google backends. Easy to add more.

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