Ask HN: Does a service for a small, personal Linux machine in the cloud exist?

[necrotic_comp]

I am looking for a small machine that sits on the internet, is reasonably secure, and can function as a server to do things like send mail, do automation jobs, is available by ssh, etc. I'd rather pay someone to do this for me than expose a box on my home network to the internet.

Does such a service exist ?

[Thespian2]

Free tier on Amazon EC2 instance?

If not, I've had good luck with Linode in the past. No longer a current user, but was happy with their service when I was.

https://www.linode.com/ https://aws.amazon.com/free/

[necrotic_comp → Thespian2]

Thank you!

[mindcrime]

Cheap VPS through OVH, Linode, Digital Ocean, Hetzner, etc?

But as @joezydeco says, running your own email infrastructure is fraught with difficulties. If you already know all this and know how to deal with the issues, have at it. If not, you might want to do some research and really consider whether or not it's a good idea to try doing that yourself.

[pickle-wizard]

I run a small Ubuntu VM on Azure. It is like $10/month. I chose Azure because I get a credit with my Visual Studio subscription.

However Microsoft does not allow outbound SMTP port 25 from Azure by default. It is possible to get them to allow it, but I do not know their criteria, as I've never done it.

I try to avoid running my own mail infrastructure. Even now when I need scripts to send mail, for reports and such, I'll use a service like Sendgrid instead of mucking about with Sendmail. It is just too easy to do it wrong and end up in a black hole.

[necrotic_comp → pickle-wizard]

Thanks! I think I can manage this with using email I've already set up, e.g. installing mutt and pointing to a different smtp server, so I'm not too worried about that, but it's good to know.

[joezydeco]

Atlantic.net will let you have a virtual private server for $9/month. A fixed IP will be a few bucks more, although I've had the same incoming IP for years and they have never changed it.

Running your own mail server is tricky. I pulled my hair out trying to get all the authentication shit in place to allow gMail to accept incoming messages. Definitely not a beginner-level task.

[necrotic_comp → joezydeco]

Thanks. Few comments about email - I likely will use hosting I already have.

[marto1]

Depending on your needs maybe an old school service like a free shell account can do the trick for you. Here's a list: https://freeshell.de/~lysy/public/free.htm

[jaytaylor]

Free tier of GCP or OCI will give you this.

OCI is "free forever", with quite capable x86-64 and ARM VMs.

GCP also works great.

[luke2m → jaytaylor]

OCI signup was awful but free tier has been great so far.

[unraveller]

A VPS with 512MB ram, ipv4, KVM (allows docker or container usage unlike openvz/lxc) can be had for a few dollars/month depending on origin and cpu. serverhunter.com is a nice site that lets you filter many of the latest indie hosting offerings.

[roschdal]

Hetzner: https://www.hetzner.com/

[astodev]

Digital Ocean AWS Amazon Lightsail Google Cloud Services Vultr Ramnode

[rl1987]

$5/month VPS on Digital Ocean.