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Ask HN: Reliable and cheap root server, 1GB+ RAM – which provider to choose?

3 points by backend-dev-33 ↗ HN
For years I used Hetzer VQ12 (unmanaged virtual machine with root, Single Core, 1024 MB RAM, 40 GB HDD) for experiments and to run some Java processes.

Nothing special, nothing fancy, just a relatively cheap (12,90 € per month) and relatively reliable (one or two times per year notifications about scheduled downtime for about 15-30 min) hardware.

At the moment there is a cronjob on this machine. Every hour it triggers a Java process which runs for about 5-10 minutes.

Now Hetzner going to discontinue these servers (they notified me in advance) so I want to move either to another Hetzner product (probably their "cloud" CX11 or CX21) or to another hosting provider.

Please share your experience. I heard some positive feedback about digitalocean (droplets?)

UPDATE: I do not want to have dependencies on cloud infrastructure. Just plain old Linux command line, nothing more

4 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 23.5 ms ] thread
viraptor
This sounds like something you could easily spin up on demand in AWS instead of aiming for reliability. Either an autoscaling group or a spot fleet that activates every hour, runs your job on startup, and kills itself. Micro is 1gb memory and costs $0.0104/h. Running that for 15min every hour is $1.8 a month. (+whatever storage space you need)

You could probably use a heroku task as well.

backend-dev-33
And Hetzner CX11 is €2.49 monthly and you have peace of mind regarding pricing (the price if FIXED).

Probably I have to rephrase the question to something like "Alternatives and side effects of Hetzner CX11 ?"

viraptor
The per-hour pricing I mentioned is fixed for the micro instance. (Well... It can go lower :-) ) I'm taking about normal EC2 instances here, so that is a cx11 alternative.
Hasknewbie
Last year I used a VPS with specs similar to yours at LeaseWeb, for around €50/year. They're OK. I don't remember any downtime but I wasn't monitoring that VM 24/7.