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Ask HN: Where do you get your cheap servers?

75 points by Smithalicious ↗ HN
As per the title, where do you guys get your cheap servers? I mean subscription-based, not server hardware. I'm a student and I'm looking for something cheap for hosting personal experiments and websites. Thought that people on HN might have the answer and be interested in the answer, too.

66 comments

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core-questions
It's all about the pre-cloud hosting providers.

Check out the Black Hat SEO forums - the people there generally are running all manner of sketchy services, bots, crawlers, etc. that need the cheapest compute available.

The old hosting providers often have deals that can get you more power than the equivalent Amazon machine for the same price. If you're looking to be able to host something that other people might use, this is a solid way to go; just make sure you build something that it's easy for you to re-deploy elsewhere (i.e. at the very least have all your code in a separate revision control system, and some mechanism to back up any databases / locally created files to your home machine).

If you're really just looking for something dirt cheap for personal projects that won't see use beyond yourself, the free / up to $5/mo tier of the big cloud providers is a reasonable thing to check out. https://vncoupon.com/5-usd-vps-compare-linode-vs-vultr-vs-di... is a bit old now, maybe there's a newer article helping you sort that out.

chatmasta
Also look at webhostingtalk.com (that’s where all the BHW vendors are buying from anyway)
Havoc
LowEndTalk offers

Very cheap but don't be surprised if a supplier goes out of business/disappears so strategize accordingly.

Plus then of course all the major cloud provide a intro credit. So that should cover about 3 years worth of basic VPS

peterwwillis
I love the lowendbox/lowendtalk forums. Dig in and you learn all kinds of inside information about the various discount hosting companies and their bizarre drama. You also learn how to spot actually reliable, professionally managed services, versus the fly by night people just looking to take your money and bail.
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segmondy
If you're looking for really cheap, then use the free servers. Google, AWS provide free tiers that are more than enough for a hobbyist.
joe_bleau
Sounds crazy, but the Orcale free tier might work for you. Enough to run two small Linux VPS instances free.
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pera
https://prgmr.com/

I have been using their VPSs for about 10 years: it's one of the best services I've ever had the pleasure to use.

kylec
You can find cheaper options than Linode, but honestly you can host lots of stuff on a single $5/month instance, and you get the benefit of their infrastructure and support. I remember being a student and paying $20/month for a SliceHost VPS with a fraction of what you can get today for much less.
tomcooks
Lowendbox, lurk 3+ years offers during blackfriday and you'll pay 1-5 dollars/year for a 2gb ram VPS with unlimited traffic in a non 13-eyes country. Payable in bitcoin.
balkierode
Google cloud free tier gives everyone (not just students) one 'always' free vps instance. It works great for me.

Oracle promised 2 instances but got an error 'out of capacity' error instead. Support staff confirmed they dont have hardware in my region.

guitarsteve
I was using that feature for the last year or so but recently they took away the public IP address. So I think it’s no longer free for common use cases like hosting a website. Correct me if I’m wrong!
ac29
Just remember Google only gives you 1GB of egress network traffic free, per month. This might be enough for a small personal project, but even a low traffic website will easily surpass that - doing a Show HN or something will blow through that quickly.
rcarmo
Put CloudFlare in front. Works fine for me.
rumanator
Hetzner.

They offer VMs with 1 vCPU and 2GB RAM for 3€/month. Quite a deal.

kyriakos
Decent uptime too. I have a vm running there with over 3 years of uptime. Not bad considering the price.
ar-jan
I second Hetzner. Their smallest VPS has been reliable for me and is even a bit cheaper than OVH. More importantly, should something go wrong or you have a question, you can expect a quite fast reply.
mstolpm
Recommending Hetzner Cloud as well. They had some connectivity problems 6-12 months ago, but seem very stable in the last months. They provide backup and snapshot features, floating IPs, internal networking and mountable volumes as well - which can be handy in comparison to a barebones server from e.g. Kimsufi where you have to manage everything yourself. Hetzners lowest tier is "much" cheaper than DO and co.
wildduck
And they have DDoS protection layer! With European data protection law better than US. It is a no brainer to pick Hetzner instead of any other services. They do have a difficult to remember name, maybe rebrand it for English speaking market.
lordnacho
Just get a Hetzner. Costs very little, good exercise to set it up with a usable config. I even have one that I barely ever use.
nickjj
I use digitalocean.

Not because they are cheap but because they are great. It just so happens they have a $5 / month plan for a 1 CPU core / 1GB of memory / 25GB SSD server.

jppope
agreed. I also use AWS for certain projects... IMO- Don't put all your eggs in one basket
Stevvo
OVH, their cheapest brand is Kimsufi. From five euros a month. i.e. your own box for the price of a VPN.
mateioprea
I'm using scaleway.com. For $3/month you get 2vcpus, 2GB RAM and 20GB ssd.
rumanator
I've tried Scaleway once when I applied for their 500€ 1-month credit campaign, but they demanded a CC and to add insult to injury charged me an activation charge that wasn't given back. Twice.

Can't say I recommend them.

pnutjam
Time4vps has some of the best prices I can find for storage. I've been using one for a could years with no problems.

Virmach seems to have comparable prices, but I haven't used them.

wensheng
AWS EC2 reserved instances, pay upfront for 3 years, it works out cheaper than digitalocean/linode.
peterwwillis
For websites, just use GitHub Pages. It's totally free, very reliable, and extremely easy. It feels like a nerdier GeoCities, but without the composing tools.
hmart
I have my important VPSs on Linode since 2008, good experience, almost zero downtime in 10+ years, very reliable, great customer support. They have a $5/mo Nanode 1CPU, 1 GB Ram.
shpx
There are at least 5 providers that will rent you a $5/month server: DigitalOcean, Lightsail, Linode, UpCloud and Vultr. There's a guy that publishes benchmarks of their $5 instance regularly

https://joshtronic.com/2019/09/02/vps-showdown-digitalocean-...

DigitalOcean is by far the most popular. Personally, I like Vultr because they also have $2.50 IPv6 only instances and you can upload your own ISO file if you want to try a less popular Linux distribution. Both services have similar user interfaces that are pretty good.

That being said, $60/year is still a lot. If you can get away with just a static site, try GitHub pages https://pages.github.com/. You only get one (unless you create GitHub organizations) but it's free. You can still have your own domain pointing to it with TLS (free through Let's Encrypt). You miss out on the fun of managing a Linux server unfortunately.

52-6F-62
Yep. I use DO and it’s been just fine for low traffic websites. They’ve been great to work with and very easy to use. But I only host personal projects and internal tooling projects with them. Can’t speak to scaling but my experience has been positive.
pnutjam
For cheap hosting, nearlyfreespeech.net is where it's at, cheap and full shell access on bad.
bennofs
Actually, you can have multiple github pages sites: just create a new repo with a branch named gh-pages. You can then add a CNAME to that as well.
daemonk
Hetzner is great. Cheap for what you get.