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Ask HN: Any cheaper but good alternatives to DigitalOcean?

53 points by SkyLinx ↗ HN
I am working on a project but I have limited resources since I don't have a job currently. I am looking if there are any good alternatives to DigitalOcean with support for additional disks/volumes, that do not cost too much. I have tried several providers including UpCloud, Hetzner Cloud, Vultr and Linode. UpCloud seems to have the best performance but all of these apart from Hetzner charge $40/month for a cloud server with 4 cores and 8 GB of ram. Hetzner gives me twice as much memory at half of the price, but performance isn't great from my testing/benchmarking, especially concerning the storage. I would use UpCloud if pricing was more affordable. I will probably need 7 servers for my setup initially with 4 cores and at least 8 GB of ram and decent storage performance. Am I asking too much or are there more options for me? Thanks in advance.

60 comments

[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 135 ms ] thread
jppope
Don't take me the wrong way here but it sounds like you're trying to get blood out of a stone. I have no doubt that you can find cheaper hosting, but you're probably better off just getting some outside money for the project (customers, investors, etc)... worrying about a couple hundred dollars difference shouldn't be the primary concern if your venture has legs.
SkyLinx
That's what I was scared to hear although I should have expected it... The problem is my particular situation. I am not in a position at the moment where I could commit with investors etc even if I were able to handle these things (not super confident from this point of view). So a few hundred bucks is unfortunately a concern for me right now.
PeterisP
In general, for many areas of online business, if you have enough users (or large business users) that you really need seven servers, then it should bring much more than few hundred bucks a month; and if you don't then it should be (with proper design and implementation) runnable either on a single workstation (your own) or on the free/trial tiers of various cloud providers.
alexlander
If you want to save this much try to find some free credits, if you didn't use Google Cloud yet you'll get $300 for free, DigitalOcean and Linode also usually have some free credit offers rolling. Don't forget to sign up for the upcoming Startup School to also get some free AWS credits!
jppope
No biggie... do some contract work for a week and pay for it with that money. If you know how to put together a project that has seven servers, busting out a marketing site or two should take you almost no time.
LinuxBender
Cheaper than the ones you mentioned? There are a few. Ramnode comes to mind. Their billing system breaks sometimes, but the VM performance is "ok" for what you pay.

Here is one of the many aggregation lists: [1] The cheap ones are really the bottom of the barrel though. Don't expect uptime or performance. I would also suggest using a dedicated CC or a virtual credit card (only a few banks do this) as the security of some of those sites is less than stellar.

[1] - https://vpscomp.com/servers

SkyLinx
Thanks, Ramnode seems limited in the plans they offer (as in, if I need to resize my servers etc). I know that I kinda need to be careful with cheaper providers... Thanks for sharing that site, very useful!
LinuxBender
You're welcome.

Indeed, as they get cheaper, options are reduced, as is uptime, performance, user portal, billing portal quality, etc..

algaeontoast
box.cock.li has always been a solid option for me ;)
was_boring
All of the major cloud providers have free credits for new customers.
harrisreynolds
What is your idea? Maybe someone here would be interested in working with you. Sounds like you need about $300/month. Is that correct?
ignaces
create multiple accounts and take advantage of free tiers
jrowley
Have you considered self hosting on an old laptop (built in UPS ;), and port forwarding your router? Just stick it in a closet, and have backups for importance stuff? Might be good enough for the time being.
haolez
I like Scaleway: https://www.scaleway.com/
duiker101
+1 for scaleway, super easy to use and very reliable, been using it for years and never had a single issue
sam_lowry_
This is a subsidiary of OVH.
jo909
No, scaleway is owned by the same parent as online.net, which is a competitor to OVH. Both are french though.
ksec
I think you got mixed up with SoYouStart

>Scaleway is an Iliad Group brand supplying a range of pioneering cloud infrastructure covering a full range of services for professionals: public cloud services with Scaleway, private infrastructure with Scaleway Datacenter and bare-metal cloud services with Online by Scaleway.

luisehk
Linode is half the price of DigitalOcean.
amdavidson
For the sizes he is talking about, their pricing is literally identical:

4gb: DO $20 / Linode: $20

8gb: DO $40 / Linode: $40

16gb: DO $80 / Linode: $80

Sure there are some pricing differences in the >32gb memory space, but they're not apples-apples comparisons.

Jack000
I use VPSdime to serve a fasttext model. Low end VPS providers could be flaky, but honestly at 1/5 the price I can just buy from a few different providers and have better redundancy. ($7 6gb vs $40 8gb at linode)

I do host my main application server with linode though.

Thetawaves
About 5 years ago, this question was asked in relation to Linode. Dejavu
module0000
Try GCP(google compute platform). You get a $300 credit good for one year. That should get you by for several months. If I remember(it's been awhile), there is a similar free offering from AWS(amazon) as well.
temikus
This is a good suggestion but be careful of runaway costs. It’s easy to misjudge the amount of money you can get charged for SD logging and ingress/egress.
KillerDiller
VMs from these providers are always shared cores (in the affordable price tier at least). So if you think you need seven 4-core VMs, either you'll end up needing much more, because you're not getting dedicated cores, or you'll end up needing fewer resources, because you're underestimating the power you'll get from dedicated cores. That said, my advice is to leave the flexibility of cloud for those with flexibility of budget and just get a dedicated Xeon server from Hetzner at hetzner.de/sb. Four cores / eight threads with 2 HDDs go from 29€, and with SSDs from 34€ (at the moment). That kind of box has a lot of horsepower to offer, and I'm sure you'll find a way to make that work for your project.
bryanlarsen
This.

I'm not sure of your use case, but it seems likely that you'd be able to use 1-2 32GB or 1 64GB dedicated machine instead of 7 8GB machines. You can get those cheap at Hetzner or OVH or OVH's surplus site Soyoustart.com

sciurus
> I will probably need 7 servers for my setup initially with 4 cores and at least 8 GB of ram and decent storage performance.

How did you determine that? Can you think of ways to make it require less?

antsar
Yeah, maybe prototype with tiny VMs first? Can you make several things share one VM initially? If you're not sufficiently confident in the idea to secure investment, it might be smart to build a smaller/leaner proof-of-concept.
weitzj
You could have a look at Netcup.de, depending whether you can live without a hosted LB like DigitalOcean has. Netcup does not have nested KVM - or at least it costs a tiny bit extra.

I had tried Scaleway roughly 2 years ago. restart times, provisioning times were bad. Maybe they are better now. I think you can finally bring your own kernel. Nested KVM works. Plus point for Scaleway is that you can use terraform. I don’t know the state of automation for Hetzner or Netcup

imichael
How about ssdnodes (https://www.ssdnodes.com/)? I've only used them for personal sites but so far, so good and it seems to be a good value. I also like webfaction (https://www.webfaction.com/). You get shell access but they manage the OS and provide a GUI for installing and configuring things.
aminmemon
Webfaction is pretty amazing. Setting up and getting started with them is quick and easy. Although GoDaddy has acquired them and webfaction will be shutting down by the end of August. They will be migrating all the customers to GoDaddy.
obenn
As long as your service can be spun in some way as a startup you should definitely apply to this grant from google.

https://cloud.google.com/developers/startups/

In my experience it's very easy to get, and the minimum is 1000$ credit for a year (scroll down to Program options). If you're lucky you can even get 3000$ and few other goodies.

ksec
The only option I know would be Scaleway, 4 Core 8GB RAM is €15.99/mo, or roughly $18.

Edit: Have you consider dedicated from OVH or Others? Remember your Cloud vCPU is really just a thread. Those dedicated sever would be 4C/8T with more memory and higher CPU performance.

KillerDiller
Worse, if you run the numbers, at DO you get 1 dedicated core (2 threads) with 8G RAM for $60, but 4 "normal" cores with same RAM for $40. Only possible conclusion is that "normal" cores are less than a full thread.
dragonwriter
Isn't that exactly what the distinction between dedicated (=“not shared”) and not-dedicated (=“shared”) normally means?
KillerDiller
Providers are not always transparent about whether CPU is dedicated or shared (and what exactly shared means). Most importantly, this distinction generally gets lost when people compare offerings of different providers, and so they end up comparing apples and oranges.

Next, when the actual "share" of a shared core is completely undefined, the idea that net performance can be improved by adding more of these shares becomes at least questionable.

Last but not least, one important takeaway from the speculative execution flaws is that a security boundary between software running on the same hyperthread is an indefensible position due to unmitigateable flaws.

ksec
Yes that is why I think Cloud VM are very expensive. And worst they are bumping out Memory in these so called General Instances, with 1 vCPU ( Thread of Less ) to 2GB Memory. The problem is I want 1 Real Core, or at least 2vCPU per 1GB of Memory.

I don't know why they are stuffing so much useless memory to make it looks like a bargain.

jaabe
I don’t mean to be rude, but why do you need 7 servers for a project that isn’t making you any money?

Couldn’t you start with less, and then scale when you need to?

dclaw
I will say this much.... Stay away from serverhub.com -- I picked them because they offered more disk space than DO for about the same price. My VM went offline in late December, opened a ticket with them, basically got the run around for 3 months, with them claiming 2 months in that their "30TB Storage Array" was still, I shit you not.... "fsck'ing". Luckily this wasn't anything important, but still. They even had the balls to bill me for it monthly until I finally told them to pound sand and refund all charges made this year (which they did)