

Ask HN: Personal Server Recommendations - kaishiro

I&#x27;m moving abroad for an indeterminate amount of time, and would like to have a personal test server setup for non-commercial use - just playing around with things.  Would also like a separate personal file server with a ton of storage.<p>I thought about getting a physical box for a while, but this hardly seems worth it anymore.  Am currently settling around the idea of just standing up a Linode instance for the test server, but was wondering if anyone knew of additional solutions.<p>For the file server, the only place I know to get that much cheap storage is Amazon - definitely interested in alternatives<p>=========================<p>Test Server<p>Reqs | Support Linux images -- SU access -- No specific hardware reqs<p>Usage | Standing up tools to test&#x2F;play with (Phabricator, git server, Diaspora seed, etc.)<p>=========================<p>File Server<p>Reqs | Support Linux images -- SU access -- Lots of storage (1 TB+) -- Immediate access to files (Glacier won&#x27;t work)<p>Usage | Torrenting (Mostly media - nothing morally illicit, although I guess that&#x27;s subjective - maybe should look at non-US hosting?) -- Long term file storage
======
zhte415
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.

~~~
MoOmer
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.

~~~
bobdvb
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.

------
dewey
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/](http://www.kimsufi.com/en/)

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

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

[3] [http://forum.kimsufi.com/showthread.php?22440-Malformated-
PD...](http://forum.kimsufi.com/showthread.php?22440-Malformated-PDF-quot-
facture-quot)

~~~
hwh
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).

------
pjkundert
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.

~~~
kaishiro
I completely forgot about [http://prgmr.com/](http://prgmr.com/). Thanks for
bringing it up.

------
fatrachet
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.

~~~
tombrossman
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.

------
moistgorilla
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.

~~~
josephb
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.

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kvmosx
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!

~~~
kaishiro
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?

~~~
lwhalen
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.

------
johnnyfaehell
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.

~~~
vomitcuddle
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.

~~~
vomitcuddle
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.

------
wahlis
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.

------
azurelogic
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.

~~~
notduncansmith
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 :)

~~~
hackerboos
Can you run GitLab on a $5 box?

~~~
notduncansmith
I'm doing so:
[http://gitlab.duncanmsmith.com/public/projects](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.

------
drKarl
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.

~~~
mijoharas
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?

~~~
drKarl
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.

~~~
mijoharas
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.

------
rickr
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.

------
import
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.

~~~
vcherubini
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.

------
hwh
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.

------
x3ro
I myself am quite happy with DomainFactory's JiffyBox Service
([http://www.df.eu/](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
:(

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Kurtz79
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.

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mrtimuk
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.

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__xtrimsky
OVH is always the cheapest!

Check their cheap dedicated servers "so you start":

[http://www.soyoustart.com/us/](http://www.soyoustart.com/us/)

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rom16384
I like Prometeus.Net, they have good prices and great support. In particular,
their XenPower ([http://xenpower.com/](http://xenpower.com/)) line is hard to
beat.

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qworty
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.

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

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ing33k
go with OVH .

