Hopefully this won't be taken as an anti-MS rant. I've been developing exclusively on Microsoft's platforms for over 20 years.
But, if developing and hosting in a cloud environment doesn't convince you to go Linux, nothing will.
While for the most part as far as feature parity and development tools, AWS treats Windows developers like first class citizens. The "Windows Tax" is clear in AWS when you can see the cost difference between running the same instance size with Linux as Windows.
Even worse, realistically, running any Windows instance with less than 8GB of RAM is painful. Your minimum cost is $70 a month.
Being in the Windows world so long, I was amazed when I started using AWS and found how much you could do with relatively few resources in the Linux world.
I never cared before, I was using other people's money.
But I'm not leaving .Net Core, its made transistioning to Linux hosted development less painful.
I would suggest adding Scaleway[0] to the list. I've used their server a bit and it worked well. I know them because of their parent company (Online) which I've been a custom for quite a few years now.
That would make sense. But T3 are comparatively speaking, much slower than DO and Linode. When Lightsail were first released those benchmarks won't any good at all.
The only reason for using Lightsail is you want all those Amazon Services, which your LightSail can hook up free of transfer using Private Network.
Yes, but I think lightsail egress is more expensive than s3 egress. On my phone, but isn’t lightsail 9 cents a GB to S3 being 8 cents? Think regular ec2 is 8 cents as well, or is that 12?
Lightsail includes a data transfer allowance, starting at 1TB, though importantly both data in and out is counted against the allowance. In the vast majority of cases, the allowance is enough. If you do use all the allowance, data transfer out charges are $.09/GB in most regions, the same as EC2 and S3, at least for the first 10TB.
I would use for anything I put on a RPi: a DNS server, a MQTT backend, some light backends for a web app (I need to connect to some light services and prices their output into a JSON), a monitoring service,...
I set up a small personal service a few months ago. My requirements were being dirt cheap and not having to manage anything statefull myself.
After looking at all cheap providers, very few of them had managed databases. So I ended up using OVH VPS + Postgres cloud database. The combo costs me 10€/month and runs surprisingly smoothly.
I hate OVH (despite my patriotic conscience which yells "achetez français" :)) for what they did with the bandwidth to hubic services. It was close to zero, completely unusable.
Their customer service completely sucks, to the point they told me that they do need me.
I kepy this in mind when signing up for a huge cloud contract where I told them straight that the way they treat their customers shows. They could have told me many things but not "fuck off, go somewhere else". This cost them a lot of money but they did not learn anything when I recontacted them again from my personal account and the customer service was still the same (of course I could have used the contacts I had there but I wanted to see if the situation impoved).
OVH is a horrible company if anything goes wrong or if you have a billing issue.
Their tech and pricing may be good, but if there's any problem you'll spend a lot of time trying to deal with them or you'll just give up a let your wasted payment fly away...
OVH is dirty cheap, because it is a fully automated service, and if you are using it for anything serious, you need to order a VIP support package[1]. People complain about their terrible support without realizing, that they only paid for the infrastructure, which costs 10x less than AWS.
great news, I love spinning up Lightsail instances for new projects!! my current running instances are not updated, I suppose I have to recreate them then..
Edit:
It seems they have added new instance types. My current instances are now 3.50$
I'm currently using Hetzner Cloud in production. Not for user-facing services, but background data churning. Very happy with the service so far, and it has a Terraform plugin, which makes it convenient to use.
I think the feature-set and cost are in proportion, if you see what I mean. Compared to AWS EC2 its a great value proposition.
Interestingly, they recently announced a 'dedicated vCPU' option for about 10x the price. Top option is €269 vs €29, 32 GB vs 128 GB RAM. But I'v found the performance of the default product to be perfectly good for my needs.
The major shortfall with Hetnzer I have found is that the storage isn't scalable. You get what you get. You can choose SSD RAID or Ceph, but you still get the same allowance.
I'd love to hear from anyone else using it.
Edit: not Hetzner's traditional servers. I've used those too, and they're great value for money if you get them through their server bidding offering.
I'm a Hetzner customer, too, but I'm quite sad that Hetzner doesn't really allow DNS configuration via a centralized REST(-like) API. You can configure DNS via an email interface but there are no officially supported libraries available and it's very clunky [1]. You effectively have to roll your own DNS servers or chose another DNS provider if you want to manage a lot of servers dynamically.
The feature I would really like is some kind of virtual networking. Even a basic VPC would be welcome, with access rules and a virtual address space. It wouldn't have to be as comprehensive as AWS. Then again, it's cheap.
Is use their CX21 (4GB RAM, 40GB NVMe/Ceph) offering for 4.90€ + VAT as a personal VPS and it makes running a little FreeBSD instance with ZFS and self-compiled ports affordable for a student.
Never again. Control panel is awful, closing your account requires jumping through all kinds of hoops (emailing a scan of your passport, really?). I still haven't succeeded.
The first section explained what kind of VPS were collected. Vultr sometimes charge estimated monthly costs (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13073048 ) , so it was not listed.
I've been using Vultr for years and they've never charged me more than my monthly usage. A n=1 report from two years ago doesn't seem like a great reason to leave them out; I'm sure you can find complaints about every other provider's billing as well.
One quick question about LightSail Load Balancers: Is the outbound traffic from the Load Balancer to the Internet is charged separately or it is taken from the instances quota?
Scanned through the FAQ but couldn't find a clear answer.
Wouldn't use Digital Ocean for shit, there are multiple stories of users were they cancelled accounts (actual production systems) because of sustained use or bogus DMCA claims.
I'm sorry you feel that way. We always try to work with our customers to resolve disputes in the best way possible. There are two sides to every story and we do respect the privacy of our customers. If you would like to talk about anything specific that you are concerned about, I'd be happy to chat at jdonnell@digitalocean.com.
I wouldn't use a service for VPS either if they reacted to DMCA/Takedown Notice claims. As the operator of the server on that VPS the DMCA/Takedown Notice is my business not the providers.
Otherwise it's a way to convenient method to cripple the competition or shut someone's personal website down for shits and giggles.
Yeah but that's not how the law works. A service provider risks losing its safe harbor status if it delegates a DMCA complaint to a party and then that DMCA complaint is ignored. Providers have an incentive to shut down services on the terms of the DMCA to protect their business.
And even if you have a registered copyright agent for your business and a form on your site to report infringement, lawyers love to blast out DMCA claims to you, your agent, and your provider, as high in the chain as they can go. It's a huge headache.
I'm not in the US and use a non-US based provider.
The EU notice&takedown procedure does not entail that you loose protection for simply forwarding such notices, all that matters if someone responsible is actually reading the contents. If I don't give a shit about the notice then you can send a C&D and if I still don't give a shit, you can sue me. Or you make someone at my provider somehow care.
Kimsufi has dedicated servers starting at 5$ per month. Yes, it's an atom, but it's yours alone, and is going to beat these on performance, memory and riskspace.
Kimsufi gets de-prioritised compared to other services on OVH’s network and there are capacity issues.
This is probably due to the fact that a lot of people use them for cheap 24x7 torrent boxes rather than the cheap personal VPS alternative they were intended as.
No, lightsail is less well documented; but are based on EC2 burstable instances. These have a baseline performance where you can use 5%-30% of the CPU, and accrue credits to burst up to using 100% for short periods.
I have one of these too, run a PostgreSQL server. You get fantastic fsync performance for that price too. Not Optane level, but almost at the same performance as a dedicated Intel S3700.
I know they're not listed in the comparison, however Vultr has superior Windows Server hosting as compared to LightSail. Their network is a lot faster and their servers are better. I aggressively recommend Vultr over LightSail if you're using Windows for something.
Meh. Look at the bandwidth pricing. If bandwidth is the Soda. DO is coke and lights sail is McDonald’s selling coke. You can get it direct at wholesale or buy it in a bottle for 5x more.
DO and Linode are very expensive compared to OVH, Scaleway or Hetzner. So this reads as "Lightsail announces 50% price drop, will still be very expensive"
Scaleaway is meaningless unless you're located in Europe.
If you're in the developed world, $2 vs $5 etc does not matter in most cases. The most important factor is that your host does what you need it to do, that the network is excellent and your servers are located where you need them to be.
If you're an American business you'd be foolish to host your servers in the EU. Locating your servers in the EU opens you up to their jurisdiction, which is a mistake, you'd be unnecessarily exposing yourself to multiple jurisdiction compliance. That problem is only going to get dramatically worse in the coming years. It's not worth worrying about saving a couple of dollars over.
Your point about OVH still falls flat for a US audience, unless saving a few dollars is a critical concern.
$20 for 4gb of ram, 4tb of bandwidth and 2 cpus at Linode is a rip-off? I guess if someone were quite lacking in funds and needed the absolute most cut-rate VPS prices they can get, it might be viewed as a rip-off. That's a legitimate issue if so, sure. By all counts Linode in fact provides a tremendous service at a low cost, as with DigitalOcean. I'm guessing that for most people, $3 vs $7 (or a similar ratio) simply doesn't matter very much, especially when you consider laws and latency.
To compete fully, Scaleaway and OVH will eventually need multiple US data centers, otherwise the price gap by itself isn't going to be enough and the world's largest economy will remain the domain of DO/Linode/Amazon/etc. Those companies already know they'll have to charge more for service in the US, which is why they don't already have lots of US data centers after all these years, they have no competitive advantage to bring to the table.
Again, if you locate in Canada you're opening yourself up to multiple jurisdiction compliance. You're going to have to comply with both Canadian and US laws in that case if you're a US business. The complexity and burden of doing so will only continue to expand.
Saving a few dollars by locating with OVH in Canada might be fine if you're just running a test setup and have no intentions of running a real business on it.
>I am European and it's 11 here; I'm talking to an European audience.
And next time you should have mentioned it in your first reply. Instead of going in full force trashing other competitors with your new account. There are lots of international audience here, from Asia to US and Australia, where Scaleway doesn't serve.
Welcome to HN, lets not make HN the same place as reddit.
If all you're interested in comparing is price, then yes it is still expensive, but there are other considerations such as network quality, support responsiveness, the actual performance of the VPS.
My experience with Scaleway is that most of the time things are fine, but over 2-3 years there have been multiple very very annoying outages that have made me want to go back to DO, where I've had no issues whatsoever.
Also, I'm not sure if it's just me being an idiot or not - but sometimes my instances have become unresponsive and I've had to reboot them with a newer bootscript from the Scaleway UI to get them working again.
Will definitely be trying out Lightsail now. Good opportunity for me to familiarize myself with the AWS ecosystem.
That's rather optimist speculation about a company whose incompetence almost lost my business its primary domain name... twice. Shame on me for not taking appropriate measures after the first time. They should be renamed Incompetence Ltd.
This sounds like a rant because it is one. It's been a few years, but I'll never forget the several mandays I spent troubleshooting OVH's incompetence.
Sadly I second that. Also I had problem with their "DDoS protection" which detected false-positive DDoS attack. I got instance suspended after 6 days after payment for next month without any refund. They noticed "weird" traffic to my instance where I had installed Cloud9 [0][1] and I assume built-in terminal was flooding instance with TCP-SYN packets when I was using it. I am glad that I haven't left anything inside, because I lost access to this instance and storage. Before that, I thought such protection rather stops instances not drops them with mounted SSD disks to do not impose an impact on other instances.
But, if developing and hosting in a cloud environment doesn't convince you to go Linux, nothing will.
While for the most part as far as feature parity and development tools, AWS treats Windows developers like first class citizens. The "Windows Tax" is clear in AWS when you can see the cost difference between running the same instance size with Linux as Windows.
Even worse, realistically, running any Windows instance with less than 8GB of RAM is painful. Your minimum cost is $70 a month.
Being in the Windows world so long, I was amazed when I started using AWS and found how much you could do with relatively few resources in the Linux world.
I never cared before, I was using other people's money.
But I'm not leaving .Net Core, its made transistioning to Linux hosted development less painful.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-lightsail-update-mor...