
Ask HN: What's your preferred VPS service for personal projects? - oliverjudge
Sometimes I feel spinning up a whole AWS band of services isn&#x27;t necessary for small projects like a personal blog or a small web app. I&#x27;ve been looking into Linode and DO.<p>What services do you use for small personal projects?
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marktangotango
For a static blog/site, there are lots of options like neocities, netlify,
bitballoon, github pages etc...

I built a service that hosts static files and provides a CORS api to a
'backend as a service' that provides a database, captcha, and user management.
My goal was to provide everything I'd need so I wouldn't have to go set up a
server for ever little project I wanted to do. I welcome any and all feedback:

[https://www.lite-engine.com](https://www.lite-engine.com)

~~~
atmosx
Hm, interesting. So many solutions around. Anyway in page [1] you have a typo:

"The authorization token is public, and may be _diabled_ at anytime to prevent
abuse."

[1] [https://www.lite-engine.com/blog/hello_world.html](https://www.lite-
engine.com/blog/hello_world.html)

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freestockoption
OpenShift - you can get some instances for free

Cloudatcost - One time fee. The instance is laggy sometimes, but it's gotten
better since they launched and I only paid ~$20 (after coupon) a couple years
ago so not a terrible value.

self-host! - Since I like tinkering with bare metal, I have a server in my
home that I CDN through CloudFlare. CloudFlare is mostly to shield my ip
address and make it less obvious I'm hosting a server (inbound is HTTPS using
CloudFlare origin certificates). Currently have a server that just runs Docker
containers, but might try Xen.

~~~
akulbe
I second the self-hosting. I have a pretty beefy Dell PowerEdge that I use for
work (self-employed) that is a vSphere host.

 _If_ I need something external, then Digital Ocean.

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btzll
I use DigitalOcean, which has great speeds and network, but also use a
dedicated server from WholesaleInternet, in which I host a few VPSs for
development purposes.

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mtmail
There was a discussion last week "Which VPN would you recommend?"
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12311366](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12311366)

My answer was [https://privatepackets.io/](https://privatepackets.io/) which
spins up a DO instance for $3.

~~~
chrisked
Parent is asking about VPS not VPN. I did only realize after reading it twice
too. Guess the VPN thread stayed top of my mind. ;)

~~~
mtmail
Ah, that's embarrassing. I can't edit or delete my comment now. All downvotes
deserved of course.

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cunni
I've been with various hosting providers, however as presiously mentioned
linode are bang on the money for service and ive never had any issues with
them in the past 5 years (i have multiple nodes with them.

However for development i host my own onsite vps's, with the use of xenserver
and proxmox this gives the best environment to deploy any multitude of
configurations.

Lastly i have some external testing/staging servers (not always vps nodes)
that i use, these are miles cheaper than linode and other providers but not
always as great in terms of support. These are hosted with OVH under their
budget brand kimsufi. They also have a brand called Sostart and OVH and those
are better supported brands.

I hope that helps you out!

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Hugodby
Scaleway provide small ARM server begining from 3e/month

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

~~~
stadeschuldt
Scaleway has two plans for 3/month:

A: \- 4 Dedicated ARM Cores \- 2GB Memory \- 50GB SSD Disk

B: \- 2 x86 64bit Cores \- 2GB Memory \- 50GB SSD Disk

Does anybody have experience how these two compare performance wise? Is it
better to have more (ARM)-cores or less (x86)-Cores?

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d0lph
RamNode, super inexpensive, and I have never had any problems with them.

You can get a 512mb(RAM) server for $3.50/mo.

I was also looking at linode a while back, it looks pretty nice.

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emilburzo
I use either a bare-metal server from online.net coupled with LXC to have
multiple separated "servers".

Or just hosting them on my "server" at home (LXC again), which is actually a
DIY beefy PC with an i7-4790 3.60GHz CPU, 32 GB RAM, 2 TB (RAID 1) HDD, APC
UPS with a ~20 minute battery runtime, 100/100mbit fiber connection.

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mbrock
I like to use GitHub Pages as much as possible (with CloudFlare TLS for custom
domains).

For more dynamic stuff, AWS Lambda is my new best friend. I'm using it for a
few projects and loving it.

For more long-running stuff I'm likely to use EC2, or for some things my
dedicated Hetzner server.

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nogox
Are you using Docker to deploy your project? If yes, check out hyper.sh.
Insanely easy!

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asimuvPR
Not a vps but I've had a good experience with webfaction. Good features, fair
price and good support.

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a_lifters_life
Digital Ocean $5 per month does fine for many of the applications i build.

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cdvonstinkpot
97cents.net does WordPress (or other Softaculous-based stuff) for <$1/mo. or
<$10/yr.

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kennu
I prefer to use AWS services that don't require any "spinning up":
CloudFront/ACS/S3 for static web files, API Gateway/Lambda for backend, IoT
for websockets. It takes some effort to configure everything, but then there's
pretty much zero maintenance involved, so you can move on to other projects
and keep the old ones running at very low cost.

~~~
kennu
I think I got downvoted by someone who doesn't like AWS. Anyway, the purpose
was to say that you don't have to spin up virtual machines on AWS if you build
your app with the serverless paradigm, and that fits small projects well
because of really low cost. Tools like Serverless can be used to automate most
of this.

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nickthemagicman
Do you need a VPS? Alot of PaaS have a free tier.

I use openshift, AWS and Heroku are good as well.

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curiousgal
OVH if you're based in Europe/North Africa.

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wprapido
digitalocean works fine for me

~~~
BorisMelnik
same, works great!

