
Show HN: Tiny VPSs without exhausting IPv4 addresses - vznatvps
https://definedcodehosting.com
======
dspillett
There are quite a few VPS services out there that offer IPv6 only.

With those if you want to make anything on the services accessible via IPv4
you need to do it via another route, such as a VPN (or even just a port
forward) to/from somewhere where you have an address to spare or for websites
perhaps somewhere where you run nginx as a reverse proxy. In fact some
infrastructure-as-a-service companies like CloudFlair offer this as a service:
your users talk to them via IPv4 or IPv6 but they always talk to you via IPv6.

Some offer IPv6 with "IPv4 NAT" which allows you to call out via IPv4 as
normal and may include calling in but not on standard ports (i.e. not 80 for
HTTP, 22 for SSH, and so forth).

~~~
spindritf
Some also offer reverse proxy for web hosting so it works on :80. I don't know
if/how they deal with ssl. You can probably do something going off SNI.

~~~
dspillett
It would have to be SNI for SSL unless they had an absolute shed load of IPv4
addresses space available, though if they are charging for the service that
would increase the chance of getting a dedicated IPv4 upon which you have sole
use of port 443.

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simon_vetter
I would definitely offer native, unrestricted ipv6 access from day one if I
was going to roll out restricted ipv4 connectivity. Not sure why they did not
deploy it, but it seems like you can get ipv6 from a lot of other low-end,
cheap providers.

~~~
vznatvps
Good news we've got IPv6 support coming by the end of tomorrow (hopefully).
All existing clients will get an IPv6 address and all new clients will
obviously get one.

~~~
tacticus
Only one ipv6 address? Surely you are going to have a /48 or larger why are
you not providing more addresses?

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mijndert
Why would you need more IPv6 addresses on a VPS that only has 48MB of RAM?

~~~
devicenull
Why wouldn't you?

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graystevens
Sounds similar to [http://lowendspirit.com/](http://lowendspirit.com/) where
you get a a port range on an IPv4 address, and x amount of dedicated IPv6
addresses. Super cheap, great for a private VPN or two.

~~~
vznatvps
We're offering a similar service, spoke to the owner of LES yesterday who is
quite [happy][0] with us offering the community a similar service since it's
not really profitable but more as an effort to help the community and offer
something cool.

[0]:
[http://lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/658755/#Comment_658...](http://lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/658755/#Comment_658755)

------
throwaway-6836
Coupon code INTROLEBT for £2/year Mini 64 and £4/year Mini 128.

You can use CloudFlare as a reverse proxy for "native" IPv4 and IPv6.

------
iamtew
Interesting service. I've seen other places doing the same, and I really
should brush up on my IPv6 knowledge..

As a side-note; I'm getting mixed-content warnings when accessing your
website. You have the PureCSS framework included with a http link, instead of
https. yui.yahooapis.com doesn't support https, so you need to host it
yourself to get rid of this warning. You also have a picture hosted on
imgur.com, which does support https.

Maybe consider updating your links to not include http/https and just use ://
instead?

~~~
vznatvps
Thanks!

Fixed all of the external content warnings, thanks for spotting that.

~~~
dublinben
You could probably also save some bandwidth, because you're only displaying
the top 400 pixels of that background image. There's no need to load the
entire thing.

------
kstrauser
May I offer a free piece of advice? Hire a proofreader. There are so many
grammar mistakes, like run-ons and sentence fragments, that it's a little hard
to follow. It looks amateurish, and I think you've worked too hard to make
people question your professionalism?

~~~
vznatvps
Thanks for the advice, I'll get someone to proofread it however at this price
I can assure you that we have to dedicate the majority of our budget to
technicalities.

~~~
kstrauser
I understand! In the mean time, I opened ticket 464188 with some suggestions.

~~~
vznatvps
Changed to all your suggestions, thanks for all your help!

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bryanlarsen
How about putting HAProxy or nginx in front of those servers to make port 80
available?

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vznatvps
We're happy to do that for any clients via a ticket. We cannot guarantee it
for everyone since it takes time, but we are certainly happy to do it.

~~~
swinglock
There's a ticket system? When hitting the ordering page you have to tick a box
that says the services has no support.

~~~
vznatvps
There's no support for a reason. These are very low cost and therefore we're
not willing to commit to providing support. We will help when we have time and
where we can and I'd be happy to either setup IPv6 or reverse proxy a domain
for a client if and when I have time. Anyway tickets can be submitted here:
[https://definedcodehosting.com/client/submitticket.php?step=...](https://definedcodehosting.com/client/submitticket.php?step=2&deptid=1)

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gergles
There is some arbitrary length limit on root passwords that isn't disclosed
anywhere (or reported if you exceed it.) I had to truncate my password several
times to get it to actually work.

~~~
vznatvps
Oops, this is a limit set by WHMCS not us. You can always change it in your
VPS.

~~~
n2j3
following root passwords seem to fail too..

4cX|%:8emq94L8X

,6r7oh97S|b"+1Z

2#E24IC^&G(x47P

I tried an alphanumeric of the same length (15 characters) and it worked. So i
doubt it's a length issue.

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therealidiot
Seems like a cool idea, what are the chances of getting dedicated IPv6?

~~~
vznatvps
We're introducing it ASAP. Currently we can provide clients with a tunnelled
IPv6 address to an Amsterdam POP. This still offers good speeds and adds
little latency. If you desire this then please submit a ticket and we can set
it up.

Also if anyone is interested in how this is technically setup then I wrote an
[article][0]

[0]: [http://blog.definedcodehosting.com/openvz-nat-
vps](http://blog.definedcodehosting.com/openvz-nat-vps)

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bnejad
Cool service. Not that it matters much but on your linked page the "Unmanaged"
and RAM amount are in different row positions for each Mini

~~~
vznatvps
Oh wow. That would annoy me too, thanks for noticing it. Fixed!

~~~
chanux
nitpick: _You can run you 're own scripts_

~~~
vznatvps
Fixed. Should learn not to write in a rush, ha.

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deckiedan
Very cool - I could see this as a very useful tool to have for personal git
repos, email, and as a proxy for getting around firewalls / testing sites from
another country (geoIP stuff).

How much free space is left on each VPS with the operating system installed?

~~~
vznatvps
They all take roughly 0.75GB of space since they're minimal installs.

Yeah OpenVPN works fine on this setup.

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cwyers
When you say "Choice of Linux OS," what are you currently offering?

~~~
vznatvps
We're currently offering 32bit and 64bit varieties of the following: CentOS 6,
Debian 7, Ubuntu 12.04, Ubuntu 14.04. If there is a custom template you desire
we can probably provide it, just PM us or drop a ticket.

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sfeng
I would think about adding a virtual host-based proxy. That way users could
provide you with their domain(s), and you could forward traffic on port 80/443
for that host to the appropriate vm.

~~~
vznatvps
We have that, clients can just submit a ticket and we're happy to do it.

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edwintorok
Any plans to support Xen? Then one could run Mirage unikernels
([http://openmirage.org/](http://openmirage.org/)) ...

~~~
vznatvps
At this price, probably not. In the future with different plans, maybe.

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bluedevil2k
The shortage of IPv4 addresses is somewhat of a misnomer - there are a few
sites selling huge ranges of them for about $10/address

~~~
vznatvps
They might sell them for that but when you're selling to a "low end" market at
£4/year $10/address is quite expensive. Especially when we don't need a range
bigger than a /27.

I agree there are still IPv4 addresses about but this teaches people that they
are running out and we should look for other solutions.

~~~
bluedevil2k
You can buy them in /22 blocks, but if you only need 32 addresses, then I
guess that is overkill.

~~~
vznatvps
Out of interest do you have a URL?

~~~
bluedevil2k
[http://ipv4hub.com](http://ipv4hub.com) \- this is a company I'm at, if you
have questions email me. (from my HN profile)

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ForHackernews
What are you policies around running Tor nodes?

~~~
vznatvps
We forbid it. Considering you only have 50GB traffic usage / month I would not
advise it even if we did allow it.

~~~
drazvan
How about non-exit nodes. I'm actually working on an app (Bitcoin-related)
that receives commands from satellite-connected devices (very low bandwidth)
and then relays those over the Tor network to a processing server hosted by
the user. So this would require a Tor node on the server to get the satellite
request and forward it over Tor.

Would this be an acceptable use? Bandwidth requirements would be extremely low
(I would say less than 100MB/month in 99% of the cases).

~~~
vznatvps
We could talk about accepting this. Fancy submitting a ticket?
[https://definedcodehosting.com/client/submitticket.php?step=...](https://definedcodehosting.com/client/submitticket.php?step=2&deptid=1)

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yuropa
Any chance of seeing OpenBSD on this? It seems like you've mentioned doing
custom templates if requested.

~~~
vznatvps
Unfortunately OpenVZ virtualisation only supports Linux OSs because they share
the same kernel. Since *BSD is not Linux based they can't be installed. Sorry
about this!

~~~
yuropa
No problem, I must have spaced on the fact that this is OpenVZ based, thanks
for the quick response!

------
bluedino
64MB? 128MB? What applications are there for that little RAM except maybe an
IRC shell?

~~~
Kadin
Statically-rendered websites (Jekyll, Blosxom, etc.) would work fine.

Though having a weird port number on a blog URL would probably cause me to
think twice before clicking on it, at least from a bare-metal Windows machine;
it makes me think "botnet dropper".

~~~
vznatvps
We can offer clients the ability to reverse proxy their domain to their VPS so
they wouldn't need to append a port.

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axyjo
Cool idea. Have you considered submitting it to lowendbox.com?

~~~
vznatvps
We've submitted and we're just waiting for staff to get round to our offer.
Thanks for the feedback!

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ridgewell
I can't tell if this is just shameless advertising.

Just for the record, LowEndSpirit.com has done the same thing well before this
was launched.

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heyalexej
Any chance of accepting Bitcoin?

~~~
vznatvps
We were waiting till Stripe supported it, but we've just applied to Bitpay. If
you submit a ticket I can keep you updated:
[https://definedcodehosting.com/client/submitticket.php?step=...](https://definedcodehosting.com/client/submitticket.php?step=2&deptid=1)

~~~
vznatvps
We now accept Bitcoin via BitPay.

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wyager
Excellent! I feel so stupid busting out my credit card to make a $4 purchase.
I will purchase one of these VPSs when I get home.

~~~
vznatvps
Haha, yeah Bitcoin support was a good shout.

~~~
heyalexej
Thanks. You rock!

~~~
vznatvps
You're welcome!

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fotoblur
"This means that when you host a website you will have to append a port to the
end"

No thanks.

~~~
vznatvps
We can reverse proxy you if needed. If you don't like it then this service
probably isn't for you.

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xanderstrike
I'm confused. £4 ($6.83) for a 64mb RAM, 3GB VM vs. $5 (£2.93) 512mb RAM, 20GB
SSD from DigitalOcean I'm seeing zero advantage and a whole lot of disadvatage
for my extra $1.83. Honestly, you can colo a Raspberry Pi and have a better
machine for cheaper.

DigitalOcean even has ipv6 now. What's the point?

~~~
vznatvps
We offer it for £4/year not month. SO significantly cheaper.

A Raspberry Pi would not provide better performance than the E3 we have.

Anyway an idea: it's fun. Trying to run a whole LAMP stack or a RoR stack on
64MB RAM is more fun than not using all your resources. Also we're cheap and
people like that. We might not always beat them in performance but we don't
break the bank either.

~~~
StavrosK
I was about to post the same comment as the GP. I thought this was per month,
and was going to say it was horribly overpriced. Now it's not :P

