
Ask HN: Worth looking for cheaper VPS than Digital Ocean? - vpser
Hi HN,<p>I want to get a Linux VPS on a yearly plan, to use for experimenting with some small side projects on Linux. The projects may not make any or much money, at least to start with (more for learning).<p>So is it worth checking out cheaper options than Digital Ocean, which, last I heard, was 5 USD per month for the lowest plan?<p>Also, if anyone recommends any other VPS host, have you tried it, and is it fairly reliable in terms of uptime, resources (RAM, HDD&lt; bandwidth) provided is what is advertised, etc?<p>Thanks in advance for any suggestions&#x2F;tips.<p>I&#x27;m not very experienced with handling VPS&#x27;s, though I&#x27;ve used them a bit in the past. But have a fair amount of Linux experience on local machines at home and work. So a few tips on things to watch out for or take care of, regarding VPS vs. local Linux box, are very welcome too. Or if preferred, I can make that a separate Ask HN post.
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profquail
Since you're shopping around, take a look at Vultr [0]. It's the same price
($5/month) and they've been recommended before by other HNers.

If you're just toying around for now, AWS offers a free 'micro' instance. It's
low-powered but enough to run a simple, low-volume site on.

[0]: [https://www.vultr.com/](https://www.vultr.com/)

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danieltillett
The great thing about vultr is they have Australian based servers at the same
price. I can't tell you how nice it is to have a 10ms ping.

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mpnordland
You may look at lowendbox.com for some really cheap vps options, performance
may not be ideal. Also beware that you might end up in an unsavory ip address
range, fine for most things but any emails sent from that ip will most likely
fail.

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vpser
>might end up in an unsavory ip address range

What is that? you mean, like, bots are run from such a range?

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detaro
Biggest issue is spammers, resulting in anti-spam blacklists blocking the IP
ranges, so many mail servers won't accept mail you try to send from there.

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vpser
Got it now, thanks.

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vsakos
Check OVH [0] ($3.49 is the lowest plan) or for even less, take a look at
Time4VPS [1], they have really cheap servers, but I wouldn't use them in
production only for dev and private use.

[0]: [https://www.ovh.com/us/vps/vps-ssd.xml](https://www.ovh.com/us/vps/vps-
ssd.xml)

[1]: [https://www.time4vps.eu/pricing/](https://www.time4vps.eu/pricing/)

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time4vps
Hello,

My name is Roman and I represent Time4VPS. Our storage units can be deployed
in production environment. Storage servers apply for 99.95% of SLA guarantee
as same as standard VPS.

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vpser
BTW, after looking a few of the options (both those I found on my own and
those mentioned here), I saw that some of them mention things like OpenVZ. I
guess that is the virtualization software used. Do we need to know something
about the underlying virtualization software / hypervisor that runs the VPS,
or is it enough to know Linux? Last VPS I used, I only interacted with Centos,
and did not know what the virtualization software was.

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mpnordland
There are differences in performance and implementation technology that can
affect performance and such, but normal Linux administration techniques should
always work. IDK off the top of my head, but OpenVZ guests I think need to run
the same kernel version as the host, so that may play into it. KVM and Xen I
belive don't have this drawback. OpenVZ doesn't give you dedicated access to
resources i.e. it will allow other guests to use what you aren't using which
affects performance. KVM and Xen I believe reserve ram and CPUs.

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vpser
Interesting. Good info, thanks.

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afarrell
You should include your own time in calculating the cost of a VPS host.

Before I discovered Linode and Digital Ocean, I tried to use the free VPS that
was developed and maintained by the computer club at my school. It took me
hours upon ours to get to an SSH terminal and would have been way cheaper for
me to just work a minimum wage job and pay for one maintained by people who
had the time to think about user experience rather than exams.

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arrmn
You're saving yourself really some time when using digitalocean, they work
without a problem and you know exactly how much you're paying at the end.

When you're a student you can get even 50$ credit through Github
[https://education.github.com/pack](https://education.github.com/pack).

In my opinion it's worth it.

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debacle
Digital Ocean for the cost conscious. Linode for the support.

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vpser
Thanks to all who replied.

