
Low-Cost VPS Testing - Cyberdog
https://toys.lerdorf.com/low-cost-vps-testing
======
n1vz3r
BTW author of the article is Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of PHP language
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf))

------
asdkhadsj
I can't wait for PaaS prices to drop. I know they'll always be relatively
expensive, but I'm primarily a dev _(not ops)_ and I don't have the time nor
desire to manage my own servers securely.

Heroku lately has seemed a tempting offer, assuming I can run my apps on it
_(Rust based)_ , but at $7/m for little side projects it felt.. expensive for
a no user side project. They can add up. A $5/m DO box can host quite a few
apps in containers, by comparison.

Perhaps Serverless would be a great playground for low/no traffic apps, but
I've not gotten into serverless much.

~~~
fastball
Have you tried running Dokku[0] on a VPS?

[0] [https://github.com/dokku/dokku](https://github.com/dokku/dokku)

~~~
asdkhadsj
No, but that's mainly because I still have to manage the server running Dokku
I believe?

edit: For context what I was already using was manual docker on a DO box.
While I recognized that Dokku would make it more seamless and easier, my issue
was managing and securing the DO VM itself. I didn't see how Dokku would help
that scenario

~~~
ivoecpereira
I would suggest reading about Ansible and working on an initial collection of
Ansible playbooks that might help on that. Check out
[https://www.thecloud.coach/ansible-crash-
course](https://www.thecloud.coach/ansible-crash-course). Of course nothing
beats a dedicated devops but some playbooks regarding main security
compliances might do a great job. Anyone correct me if I am wrong but I am
seeing it as a good base practice for these cases.

~~~
scarejunba
Honestly, I think this is going in the wrong direction for OP's use-case. He
definitely should go in the serverless direction.

If he learns any sort of dev-ops infra management he's just wasting his time.

~~~
ivoecpereira
Possibly. I use Serverless as well but I prefer to keep my options open when
playing with a new project, than trying to force everything into the same
tool. If he is lean to learn something, Ansible might be good for setting some
servers up, but there are some nice other suggestions in the thread if he
doesn't want to.

------
indigodaddy
I've been a Netcup customer for a year and a half or so, and I love them.
Locations in Germany only, but for less than $10/mo (5.29EUR), you're not
going to do much better than this on price to spec ratio. Performance is
fantastic. I have the 8G/300G SAS rootserver for 8.99EUR (rootservers just
give you dedicated cores). Note however that (similar to BuyVM), they are also
extremely quick to cancel you outright if you don't pay in time.

[https://www.netcup.eu/bestellen/produkt.php?produkt=2006](https://www.netcup.eu/bestellen/produkt.php?produkt=2006)

~~~
mylonov
There is (seems to be) no way to quickly spin up an instance for testing for
new customers. After completing the order form I received an email stating
they will check my address details and only after that complete the order and
let me pay.

~~~
indigodaddy
Yes, you go thru the auth process, pay, and then they email you VM details
after provisioning. Fairly standard. I don't think they claim to be very
"cloudy," so yeah you're not going to get on-demand VM's you can just spin up
like DO/Vultr. Perhaps they're hourly billing is confusing or misleading to
lead you to think that. And it honestly really isn't hourly billing I don't
think, unless they don't bill if you turn the VM off (never tested that).

------
boris
I would recommend staying away from OVH for anything important (e.g., a mail
server). While the service is fairly reliable, when things do go wrong (like
an IP network that you share with others get blacklisted because one of the
IPs is part of a botnet), their support is useless. They do respond and are
very polite, but nothing actually gets fixed and you eventually realize they
are just wearing you down hoping that you give up.

~~~
voidwtf
OVH is pretty much useless for anything 'important'.

Worked with a company that had a large spend account with them as part of our
VM/VPS offering which was built on top of leased bare metal where OVH was
handling all our Roubaix VM/VPS. Without warning they capped every server to
10Mbps. Their explanation was not given to us individually but posted in
french on their forums. We only knew what was going on because a francophone
customer translated the message for us. We'd gotten lumped in with seedbox
hosts and large CDN accounts.

The gist was they didn't want to cater to high bandwidth consumers, something
they didn't evaluate as (# servers / BW usage) but by (account / BW usage).

They wouldn't even lift the bandwidth limit to transfer data off the servers.
Not even for private traffic. 10Mbps ports for all of them. We had to offer
our customers free service in another region or their data.... Choose one....
Just to try and limit the amount of data we moved off.

If they'd given us any warning we'd have been perfectly accepting of them not
wanting our business. Whatever they're reasoning, it's a good reason to never
consider them for anything mission critical every again.

------
tambre
A big caveat not mentioned for Digital Ocean is that they blackhole IPv6 email
traffic. It took a while for me to figure out why it wasn't working since it
wasn't documented in their documentation and there was no ICMPv6 response
indicating this. Moved to Linode after that.

I wonder if the same caveat applies to other providers that have improperly
implemented IPv6 by not providing a /64.

~~~
tyingq
I don't agree with their policy, but it is difficult these days to run your
own outbound mail service and not end up in the spam box.

I gave up and pay for Gsuite as an SMTP smarthost so my outbound email isn't
tagged as spam. That allows me to still process the inbound on my server if I
want.

Obviously doesn't help the privacy concern if that is your motivation for
running your own SMTP.

If, however, cost is a consideration, Yandex is an option. They will host SMTP
for your domain at no charge. [https://yandex.com/support/connect/add-
domain.html](https://yandex.com/support/connect/add-domain.html) (assuming
Russian hosting is okay for you)

~~~
tambre
Been running my mail server on Linode for almost 2 years now. Fortunately I've
yet to run in any issues. Having setup all the stuff properly from day 1
probably helps (TLS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, MTA-STS).

~~~
tyingq
Do you send a fair amount of email? Where I had trouble was running an ecom
site. We set up all the things you mention correctly. We never sent any
unsolicited email, but I assume people might occasionally flag a receipt or
password reset as spam, and then it was game over for our email getting
delivered. No issues since switching to gSuite.

~~~
tambre
Personal email server so I only send a small amount. Sometimes a few emails
per day, some weeks only 1.

Did the outgoing emails for the site ramp up fast? Did you only encounter
issues with Gmail or with other big providers too?

~~~
tyingq
It was a slow ramp. Issues with Gmail, o365, and others.

------
benbristow
Been using DigitalOcean for a while now with a Dokku setup and running
multiple sites/apps on it.

Excellent uptime and very good connectivity, great interface and the pricing
is very fair. Even moved a client to them with no real issues.

Would definitely recommend for a developer looking to get themselves online
with a limited budget.

~~~
skunkworker
My only gripe with DO is the stability for some of their regions. Some of them
have been solid and only have minor outages, but others like one of the ones
in AMS has had intermittent issues. For me their most attractive product is
the DO spaces and is a quick drop in for S3.

But in all I like their servers and I go between the guides from DO and Linode
to setup services that I’m unfamiliar with.

------
justkez
I've been running some live services on Hetzner Cloud
([https://www.hetzner.com/cloud](https://www.hetzner.com/cloud)) and it's been
very reliable. One server blip in ~1 year.

2Gb (20Gb storage, 20Tb transfer) from €2.49 - there are a few different DCs
now so you can hedge your bets. The higher spec ones are great for Dockerizing
a couple of postgresql backup servers.

Their VPS ('Cloud') offer is relatively new, with the dedicated and server
auctions being their historical staple.

P.S. Very Euro centric, so probably not so good for Americas/AsiaPac

------
Havoc
Huge bunch of fly-by-night VPS shops shut down earlier today:

[https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/161957/psa-a-bunch-
of-...](https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/161957/psa-a-bunch-of-leb-hosts-
deadpooling-arkahosting-supremevps-umaxhosting-hosting73-hostbrz-ku/p1)

Be careful out there guys

------
mirimir
For those who want to lease ~anonymously with payment by Bitcoin:

    
    
       BitHost     OK cpu and ram   OK uplink     overpriced
       CockBox     OK cpu and ram   slow uplink   OK price
       HostSailor  OK cpu and ram   fast uplink   OK price
       VPS.BG      OK cpu and ram   OK uplink     OK price
    

BitHost is a Digital Ocean reseller.

------
amatecha
I've used BuyVM for years and they are quite reliable. Though, I had one VPS
terminated (including all data wiped) because I didn't pay the monthly invoice
within 1 week of the due date. They have one of the most strict timelines on
invoices I've ever seen for a web service:

4,2,4 - Unpaid services will be suspended four days past the due date on the
service.

4,2,5 - Unpaid services will be terminated seven days past the due date on the
service.

That said, the $15/year package is a super excellent deal for a basic VPS and
I've never had any technical issues.

~~~
Hamuko
Is that $15/year some old offer or is it still available? Not seeing it on the
site.

Also, how is that block storage so much cheaper than anyone else's?

~~~
Havoc
Their bottom end openvz is 15 bucks. That's probably what he's referring to

[https://buyvm.net/openvz-vps/](https://buyvm.net/openvz-vps/)

------
amanzi
For those of us in NZ, there are only three providers on the list of "good" or
"really good" that have a presence in Sydney: Vultr
([https://www.vultr.com/](https://www.vultr.com/)), Linode
([https://www.linode.com](https://www.linode.com)), and VPS Server
([https://www.vpsserver.com/](https://www.vpsserver.com/)).

~~~
jonny383
+1 for Vultr. Not in NZ but we've been using them for various app / database
servers for coming on four years now and we have literally only ever had one
minor issue. Their support is through ticketing only (AFAIK), but their
support team is very fast at responding.

~~~
amanzi
I've used Vultr for a few years now and am overall very happy. I just wish
they'd bring their block storage offering to Sydney too.

~~~
jonny383
Can't +1 this enough!

------
jacob019
Just switched jacobsparts.com over from ec2 to vultr. Cheaper by the hour than
a 3yr reserved instance on aws, none of the nickel and dime billing and the
cpu is sooooo much better, cutting ~250ms off the response time. Had an
unplanned reboot today. Got an email from support and then it went down for
about 20 seconds. Overall there is tremendous value in the smaller hosts, and
I loved the article; though doubt some of the hosts reviewed will be around
for long.

------
juskrey
Well, nowadays all of them are just fine when you install OS and run several
tests. Problems handling is what really matters.

------
nickjj
Another important "potential pro" metric is how fast can you reset a server to
a blank state without having to flat out destroy + create a new one.

This is super handy for testing configuration management tools.

With DigitalOcean they have a rebuild option where you can take an existing
server and rebuild it with a new image. It takes like 10 seconds to wipe your
server clean in 1 button press and you always get the same IP address. You
also don't get charged for a new server since you're still using the original
one.

It makes testing something like Ansible really pleasant because you can
iterate so quickly. I know you can always test things in a local VM (and I do
for most of it) but there are subtle differences in DO's base image vs a stock
or bento vagrant box of ubuntu / debian.

------
Ayesh
I've been using Vultr for almost 3 years now. They had some problems with 1-3
server reboots a year, and I once had some trouble with IPv6 setup. The
support was quite helpful, but they ended up moving my instance to a different
host node.

They take Bitcoin (verification needed) too.

I received a good amount of credits for finding a security vuln in their CP
(not severer), and prices are quite good to begin with. If anyone plans to use
them, I recommend the High Freq line. Snapshots are currently free. Additional
IPv4 and /64 IPv6 cost $3/mo. Network-level firewall and fast DNS (although NS
in same /30, anycasted) is for free.

Block storage is reasonable and is on par with Digital Ocean, and is fast. I
have 50GB $0/mo instance as an early customer.

------
wvh
If the person who did the testing reads this, thank you for sharing that
information. I think it's important to know which providers are good hosting
options for smaller companies and personal projects without providing a bad,
unreliable or even shady service.

------
bullen
I'm surprised that smaller companies have not moved away from static pricing
yet.

We need to introduce a common way of comparing these say: GHz CPU-core day, MB
RAM day, MB SSD WRITE, GB SSD READ / NET?

Like this works now you're always comparing apples and oranges and maybe that
is the way Amazon and Google (both on KVM now!) wants it?

Few small operators in Dallas, Kansas and Nuremberg are well placed for
latency sensitive activity:

\- vpsdime (7$)

\- 1&1 IONOS (2$)

\- Hetzner (3$) & Contabo (6$)

I'm going to try IONOS because they also have a center in Germany!

None in Asia though? You need it to be in Taiwan to service the region well!

Only found yardvps.com (6$) in Taipei and they limit bandwidth to 100GB
(2000GB for same price in Dallas).

~~~
pipeep
> I'm surprised that smaller companies have not moved away from static pricing
> yet.

The physical server has a fixed set of resources. If you let customers pick
what resource they want to buy, you'll run out of one resource before the
rest, leaving the server underutilized and increasing your costs. You can't
sell KVM instances with no ram, no disk, or no CPU.

If you have enough physical servers and small enough customers, you can mostly
solve this by carefully figuring out which customers to put on which machines.
However, you've created a complicated jigsaw puzzle. And what happens if you
need to shift customers between servers to balance things out?

I think Google is able to offer custom machine types because they're big
enough, and because they're able to perform live migrations between physical
hosts (most hosting providers can't do this), so the customer likely won't
even notice if they need to be migrated.

Instead, most of these providers offer a few different SKUs to satisfy
different use-cases, or they just pick one target market (e.g. lots of disk
space for backups or lots of CPU resource for compute) and focus on that. A
few offer networked block storage, which gives some more flexibility, but at
the (potential) cost of reliability and performance.

> None in Asia though? You need it to be in Taiwan to service the region well!

Bandwidth in Asia is significantly more expensive
([https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-costs-around-the-
world...](https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-costs-around-the-world/)), so
most budget hosting providers stay away.

------
interfixus
Happy to see Lunanode rated Really Good. My exact experience during more than
three years as a completely happy customer. They don't stock any Alpine Linux,
but fetching the install image and setting up is a breeze, and not once, ever,
have I had an issue with any of my instances. And highly appreciated: I can
clone an instance, download the qcow2 image, fiddle with it locally, upload,
and put it back in production. Flexible, easy, clean, no nonsense, reliable,
cheap, and absolutely recommended. Don't know about support, though, since so
far I have had no cause to call them.

~~~
adar
LunaNode has been great, I just wish they had even one US location or
something that wasn't on OVH's network.

------
627467
I have a contabo ssd vps with 8gb ram for ~5eur/month I'm quite happy for
bango for buck

------
gigatexal
DD is a terrible way to benchmark disks. You want to use fio like is done
here:
[https://www.storagereview.com/node/3520](https://www.storagereview.com/node/3520)

------
m_b
Regarding Scaleway lack of rDNS for IPv6: it's because they don't support it.
Customers (like I was) asked for it many times since 2016 but it seems too
hard to implement for them.

~~~
nieve
In my experience Scaleway isn't worth the risk. I had multiple weeks-long
periods for different vpses (and both FreeBSD & Linux) over the course of two
years where their network-mounted root disks would start throwing errors and
then drop offline entirely. Worse, after one of these incidents their control
panel usually wouldn't allow a reboot. I went round and round with support and
the most they ever did was clear a flag for that and tell me they were
experiencing network issues. I've also used Ramnode, Linode, Servercheap,
Amazon, Heroku, various small local colo companies over, etc. and Scaleway was
the only actively bad one.

Unexpected outages, disk corruption, and usually not even a credit when I'd
been up and down for days. If you have problems like that with your
infrastructure and they crop up on and off for years, you need to bring in new
people and invest in infrastructure. They aren't going to.

~~~
iseeyou
I have similar experience with Scaleway for the disks. I have been running a
few cheap dedicated ARM/Atom servers there for many years. It seems be a tied
to a specific host or model, I have one of the first arm's which has been dead
stable, but I have seen disk issues with both my new Atom's and newer ARM's.

I still use them for some non-critical stuff because their cheap dedicated ARM
and Atom's give you isolation like a dedicated machine. In combination with a
LUKS mount I like to think it's safer against any Meltdown/Rowhammer-like
attacks than a shared instance.

But if you want a stable VPS you might have better luck elsewhere.

------
exikyut
Two related questions not answered in this article:

\- Where can I find good low-cost KVM with decent monthly bandwidth in
Australia? Primarily want a remote fast Linux/VNC desktop (which will chew a
lot of bandwidth), and want bandwidth left over to actually do things with.

\- There's no mention of Oracle's always-free cloud offerings (100GB disk, 1GB
RAM, 10TB bandwidth). Interested to hear what people think of this.

~~~
InvaderFizz
I'm quite happy with their free tier. I have two Ubuntu machines hosting
various docker images.

Network bandwidth seems capped at around 50mbps, but that is perfectly
adequate for my needs.

CPU is quite strong, it's two AMD Zen vCPUs. The compile times for a few of my
containers was acceptable.

Three downsides:

-No reverse DNS (at least I couldn't get it to work)

-No IPv6

-It's Oracle, I made sure I only used personal info and would never consider it for work purposes.

~~~
indigodaddy
Free public (static?) IP too?

~~~
InvaderFizz
Yes. Instances keep their public IPs for the instance lifecycle. The IP is not
reserved though, it is attached to that instance. So if you destroy that
instance and spin up a new one, you won't have that IP anymore.

~~~
indigodaddy
Cool, you also said appears to be capped at 50Mbps, however if you use the LB,
might be more like 10Mbps ?

(according to the free tier description at
[https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/#free-cloud-
trial](https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/#free-cloud-trial))

------
cerberusss
My preferred remote desktop tool is TeamViewer. Almost no VPS actually
supports this, because TeamViewer needs a virtual graphics card (that's what
I'm calling it, but I actually don't know what to call it).

Linode used to provide one at 1024x768, but I think they no longer do so.
Vultr however does support one, at 1280x1024.

Anybody else have this preference for TeamViewer?

~~~
Youden
Apparently TeamViewer supports headless Linux servers:
[https://www.teamviewer.com/en/remote-access-headless-
linux/](https://www.teamviewer.com/en/remote-access-headless-linux/)

I'm guessing what you're getting at here though is that you want to manage the
server through a desktop interface, complete with windows and menus and the
like. Most people don't do that on Linux servers because most of the things
you need to interact with to administrate one are only accessible through a
command line interface.

That said, if you really want to manage a Linux server graphically, you might
be able to make it work with something like Xvfb.

~~~
cerberusss
Yeah, I want a desktop. I manage my server via ssh of course, any extra
graphical cruft is a liability there.

> Xvfb

I might, but I've tried a zillion things, and they all suck when you compare
it to the ease of use that TeamViewer offers. What I also left out, is that
I've already got the TeamViewer client running, because I remote into macOS
and Windows.

~~~
Youden
Xvfb would give you the virtual desktop that the TeamViewer Server gives you
access to. You'd still use the TeamViewer client to connect to it.

Xvfb is just a way of running a graphical environment on a machine that
doesn't otherwise have one.

~~~
cerberusss
That is... interesting. Is it maintained and packaged by the distros? It
doesn't look like it. Duckduckgo gives me a bunch of old 2012-2013 results.

~~~
Youden
You should search your package manager, not Duckduckgo. On Debian-based
distros it's simply called xvfb, on Arch Linux it's xorg-server-xvfb, in the
RHEL ecosystem it's xorg-x11-server-Xvfb but might require enabling extra
reporitories.

~~~
cerberusss
That's a good tip, thanks. This is quite an interesting approach!

------
fake-name
This is one of those areas where if the company selling this sort of product
_isn 't_ maintaining modules for their service in
ansible/puppet/saltstack/etc...., they're really doing theirselves a
disservice.

I've had to fix the saltstack vultr integration multiple times when they break
it. it's really annoying.

------
drej
I may have messed it up, but last time I tried Lightsail (being a loooong time
user of Digital Ocean), I set up a CPU-intensive workload and it stalled
within a short period of time. Then I found out the Lightsail instances are
t-based ones, so I ran out of credits?

So I guess it depends on the workload as well.

------
pnutjam
I didn't see time4vps on here. They are the only provider I've seen with large
storage vps's for a reasonable price. I use one to do all my cloud backups and
I can still run afew services on top.

~~~
prirun
Hmm... their largest storage VPS, 8TB, is $1437 USD/yr, which works out to
around $15/mo/TB. This is 3x more expensive than Backblaze B2 @ $5/TB/mo. It
seems like you'd do better using something like B2 for cloud backups and
getting a $5/mo Linode VPS or $2.50/mo Vultr VPS for your other services. I
use both Linode and Vultr and like them both.

~~~
pnutjam
I'm on 1tb, so it's a break even to use b2 and add another cheap vps. Plus I
can use Borg.

------
Havoc
If you're willing to take a chance on smaller operations you can get
significantly more powerful stuff.

e.g. I purchased a VPS with 3vcore and 4gig RAM at 6 USD a month during black
friday

------
ignorantguy
lowendbox has a lot of good options.

~~~
bufferoverflow
LowEndBox indeed has great deals once in a while, but it's impossible to
navigate. You can't search by specs. If you want a cheap VPS/dedicated server
with certain specs, try

[https://www.serverhunter.com/](https://www.serverhunter.com/)

And if you don't mind dealing with the russian UI, try

[https://poiskvps.ru/](https://poiskvps.ru/)

------
todotask
For UpCloud referral, you still need to deposit 10USD to get on top of 25USD
free (non-expiry date), it's overall a better deal.

------
coleifer
Why was Rasmus so concerned about reverse DNS? That's not something I'm very
familiar with. Can anyone help explain?

~~~
tyingq
Reverse DNS is what maps an IP address to a host name. A PTR-record type is
used to store reverse DNS entries. The name of the PTR-record is the IP
address with the segments in reverse order followed by ".in-addr.arpa". For
example the reverse DNS entry for IP 2.3.4.5 would be stored as a PTR-record
for "5.4.3.2.in-addr.arpa". That then points to "somehost.yourdomain.tld".

It's important for things like email, where the receiver can do a reverse DNS
lookup to make sure your host is supposed to be sending email from
"example.domain". Lacking proper reverse DNS, your outgoing email could be
marked as spam. Or rejected outright for one not existing. It's also used for
some forms of SPF entries (though that's discouraged).

Last, it's somewhat useful for logs if you have hosts in your domain that
connect to each other. Though, usually, you're encouraged NOT to configure
apache, syslogd, etc, to do reverse DNS lookups...for performance reasons.

