1y ago

Recommend me a good and cheap VPS.

I currently use a Droplet from DigitalOcean which gives me 1 gb of RAM, 25 gb of storage and a bandwidth limit of 1 TB which is priced at 6 dollars per month, I think this might be a good offer, but I also think I'm overpaying because the only thing that I use from that is Wireguard to get around CGNAT at my home (which I could already do with Zerotier or Tailscale, so I don't always use it).

I do have a couple of docker containers as well, but the most important one being Pi-Hole is only used along with WG, I also expose some services to the internet, like Overseerr, Plex (only to 1 user) and most recently this, https://wefwef.app/posts/lemmy.world/all

Keeping within what DO already offers me would be nice, especially the bandwidth, which I some months got past of it because I opened the torrent port to seed more... I stopped when a DO letter arrived which is amusing because my country could not care less about torrenting. 🤣

I tried to go with the cheapest option ever (free) oracle cloud, but they never accepted any of my credit or debit cards nor they cared about it lol.

I don't think I'm a power user by any means, so please, if you have a better offer do tell, or maybe that price is fair for my usage?

EDIT: forgot to add that a public IPv4 address is a must, because you know, the CGNAT.

54 comments

racknerd is running a deal on 1cpu/1GB/25GB 4TB bandwidth at $13/year
- Fwiw racknerd still has their 2022 black Friday deals active. I just got 8 core 12 gb ram 100 gb SSD 12tb bandwidth for 161 annual (little over 13 a month). Just search it on Google. It's still live on their store site.
  
  holy shit EDIT: Just got a pretty sick little vps for a year for like $40. Thanks!
  
  Yeah, not seeing that. I have the 3 vCPU 4.5GB RAM one for about $50/year, but nothing like what you are seeing.
  
  Thats funny. They have 4th of July sale but the black friday prices are better.
- That seems like a good pricing, are you using it right now?
  
  Set one up yesterday. My first experience with VPS, but it was straightforward; seems plenty fast, but I haven't done anything to push either memory or CPU.
- This is awesome. Thanks.

I use Hetzner and it's really good imo
- Same here, 2 instances, 1 in Germany, 1 in Finland. Both small vps'es (one smallest, 1 1 size bigger) work like a charm now I added swap.

Serverhunter is a search engine for cloud servers and has easy to use filter functions.
I am surprised that I didn't see anyone link to https://lowendtalk.com/ and https://lowendspirit.com/, OP can ask in both places and see what people have for offer.

It's not the cheapest option on here, but Hetzner Cloud has some pretty good servers. I think their least expensive VPS is about $3.60 a month and comes with 4GB of ram and 40GB storage.
- +1 Hetzner, been a customer for years, they're very stable.

Oracle Free Tier - as many (ARM) VMs as you can fit in 24gb RAM and 4 vCPUs.
- I've been trying to register for the past month with no luck
  
  I think they might have shadowbanned that service lol.
- Until they remove our account for no reason

I use a IONOS vps from the XS tier for your exact usecase! It's only 1€/month and comes with 1 vcore, 1GB RAM and 10 GB SSD storage. Connection is fast too (400 MBit/s+) and data transfer is free (fair use). It comes with one public IPv4 adress.
IONOS is the hosting and cloud division of 1&1, a large ISP here in Germany. Super reliable and zero issues for over 3 years of continous use! I had my fair share of problems with smaller and somewhat dubious hosters before, so now I stick to the established ones.
They have datacentres in the US & Spain too, btw. You can also choose OVH (big french hoster) with locations in Germany, France, Canada etc., but they were more expensive last time I checked.
The IONOS management website is great too. They have free snapshots, paid backups, (web) KVM access and a configurable firewall.
- Thanks for the recommendation, that pricing looks neat!
- Thanks for the recommendation. Their offerings look pretty affordable.

Contabo and NetCup are really cheap. But only if you use their shared VPS option. If you are lucky the CPU steal is low.
- If you are lucky the CPU steal is low.
  What do you mean?
  
  The CPU steal time is the time the virtual core is waiting for the physical core. That means a VM is waiting for the hypervisor until it shifts CPU time to the VM again. More virtual cores sitting on a physical core means higher CPU steal. And higher CPU steal means bad performance because the hoster is allocating more virtual cores on a physical core that it can manage.
  
  Presumably they mean that the CPU resources are over-provisioned, meaning that the virtual CPUs allocated to VMs have to share a smaller pool of physical CPUs. If the VMs have a lot of idle time, this can work well, but if your VM suddenly needs more CPU, the processes on your VM might need to wait for a physical CPU, as physical CPU cycles that would normally be available to you have been "stolen away" by processes running on other VMs.

@kratoz29 @selfhosted You cannot go much cheaper from $6 per month... there's just not that far down to go. You can save maybe another $3 per month. There's a $3.50/mo plan on Vultr. I have an OVHcloud VPS that cost $100 for 2 years but that was some special promotional deal.
I also stumbled across this one that is $3.40/month (but the $5/month is a much better deal, with 4GB of RAM) but I don't know anything about this hosting provider so it could just as well be a scam: https://bill.alexhost.com/cart/moldova/

I use servarica.com for both my lemmy and misskey instances. Search the summer sales!
- Ok, I don't think this is entirely related, but opening this link on Safari https://servarica.com/all-offers/ will make my mac freeze and behave poorly with CPU spikes of configd process.... I need to check this shit.
  
  Oh my goodness (obviously im super opinionated on this) never use safari, its stoopeed. Only use Firefox, Chrome or even ... Edge. Not sure if that will help you, but safari is gross.

I use vultr for the same and the same price.
It has a cheaper option but it's with slower CPU and HDD instead of SSD.
And actually I pay $1 more for 40GB of block storage for some archiving of sites I want to keep.
- I honestly don't think I'm getting the perks of SSD... but maybe I am and never realized lol.

Kimsufi has pretty cheap stuff.
- Kimsufi
  Well, it is cheaper than DO.

I use Linode, I don’t think it’s cheap. Is it priced ok and my team and I just order too much?
- I'm still on Linode and have been for over a decade. Just very sad to have seen them lose their independence after selling to Akamai. Prices went up immediately and the whole "family of sysadmins working for sysadmins" feeling was gone.
  
  FWIW, I haven't seen a similar change from Ramnode after they sold to InMotion. They still seem quite good, and I'm picky. A bit more info on my experience (plus my affiliate code) upthread.

I rent from Contabo. They rent out Proxmox VMs. 6 Euro/month for 4 cores ( E5-2630 v4 in my case), 8GBs of RAM, 200GB SSD and I think 200Mbit connection

BuyVM has some reasonably priced servers available.

Hey I have cgnat too and am looking to implement my own wireguard vpn. Can u please post some guide how to do it with a vps?
- Install PiVPN on the VPS.
- I don't have a guide at the moment, but the easier way is to look up for Tailscale.

That price is pretty fair for what you get.
I've had really good experiences with Ramnode for years. I run VPN endpoints, reverse proxies, and various web apps in a couple of their data centers and have had about as close to zero problems as possible, plus their support is quite competent when something does break. Performance is what I expect 99% of the time.
Before that, Linode was good for me as well, and I still have friends who like it.
If you do try Ramnode out, here's my affiliate code, I am broke as fuck and really appreciate it. https://clientarea.ramnode.com/aff.php?aff=4335
- That price is pretty fair for what you get.
  So you think with my usage that is money well spent that could not be reduced by a similar option?
  
  The lower you go in price, in general the more problems you'll have with overselling, poor management, poor support, etc.
  After coming back to this thread and reading some more comments, it sure looks like I could save up to $3 a month over what I pay for cheap VPS at Ramnode, but in all my years of being a Ramnode customer, they haven't pissed me off, and their support has always been excellent. I have no desire to move, and I'm somebody who has very little money, so cheaper hosting would make a difference.
  Just a data point, good luck in your search!

54 comments