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Ask HN: Worth looking for cheaper VPS than Digital Ocean?

9 points by vpser ↗ HN
Hi HN,

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).

So is it worth checking out cheaper options than Digital Ocean, which, last I heard, was 5 USD per month for the lowest plan?

Also, if anyone recommends any other VPS host, have you tried it, and is it fairly reliable in terms of uptime, resources (RAM, HDD< bandwidth) provided is what is advertised, etc?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions/tips.

I'm not very experienced with handling VPS's, though I'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.

18 comments

[ 6.3 ms ] story [ 125 ms ] thread
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.
arclyte
Awesome site, thanks for posting! I'm in the the same boat as the OP and just happened to see this thread pop up while investigating, so this at least serves as a good source for comparisons to relatively more expensive options.
vpser
>might end up in an unsavory ip address range

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

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.
vpser
Got it now, thanks.
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/

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.
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

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

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.

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.

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.

In my opinion it's worth it.

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

Thanks, good point. I had just started to think, after posting the question, that maybe I shouldn't bother about $5 vs. $2.5 or $3, and instead look at the reliability of the host. As you say, if more of my own time is needed with the cheaper option, it would actually be more expensive.

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.
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.
vpser
Interesting. Good info, thanks.
debacle
Digital Ocean for the cost conscious. Linode for the support.
vpser
Thanks to all who replied.