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Ask HN: Where to get cheap VPS with big storage?

55 points by fileeditview ↗ HN
I am currently working on a self-hosted image sharing platform as my January side-project (Will post a Show HN when it's done).

Can you recommend VPS providers that offer cheap/reasonable plans with big storage?

SSD is not needed for this.. I would even prefer conventional HDDs if that saves money/offers more storage. Processing power and RAM should also be secondary as long as it's enough to scale images in a reasonable time.

50 comments

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867-5309
Contabo are the best for GB per €
fileeditview
Thanks, looks pretty Good. I still would have hoped there are VPSes with low specs but storage in the low terabytes. Guess I found a niche that is not really in demand.
dirtnugget
I can also recommend contabo for exceptional pricing and service. They are very quick and friendly to respond. Maybe you can work out a custom plan with them if you contact them.
fancythat
I personally know two people that lost all data with Contabo, so be careful.
welterde
When was that roughly (recently or years ago?) and what was the cause?

In any case one should never forget that RAID is not the same thing as backup (which applies to a lot of not quite RAID solutions as well).

Matsta
Contabo are quite cheap, but BuyVM's storage slabs at $5/month for 1tb seem cheaper and probably have better performance: https://buyvm.net/block-storage-slabs/
867-5309
thanks, that's very cheap

c.e. minimum extra $2/mo. for their cheapest VPS (required)

ddorian43
Lowest I've seen is https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/sx62 at 1.6€ / TB / month. Anyone seen lower ?

You should be extra careful on big servers with little bandwidth, you might need a month to fill/empty/rebalance them.

How will you host the images ? Metadata will become a bottleneck before hdd size.

Check out https://github.com/chrislusf/seaweedfs

fileeditview
Thanks but the audience is family & friends. Basically a solution for small circles of people that don't want to share their private images/videos on Google, Facebook, Flickr or similar.

I don't think metadata will be a bottleneck in this scenario.. but maybe I am just naïve here.

I also consider just running a small box in the basement with dynamic dns instead of using a VPS.

ddorian43
No it won't matter for this scenario.
angrais
>> How will you host the images ? Metadata will become a bottleneck before hdd size.

Could you provide more details on this? Are you saying accessing the metadata will be a bottleneck (via E.g., a relational database)?

>> You should be extra careful on big servers with little bandwidth, you might need a month to fill/empty/rebalance them.

Also, what do you mean by fill/rebalance in this context?

ddorian43
> Could you provide more details on this? Are you saying accessing the metadata will be a bottleneck (via E.g., a relational database)?

It's the problem of having too many small files. Explained here https://github.com/chrislusf/seaweedfs#introduction.

> Also, what do you mean by fill/rebalance in this context?

Assuming you are replicating the data. You have to be careful of cascading failures if repairing replication is too slow because of slow network/disk-io/cpu.

ksec
You really should be looking at good old fashion Dedicated Metal if you really want low pricing.

OVH, Hetzner or ScaleWay. Apart from Hetzner they other two also offer VPS as well.

fileeditview
I am coming to the same conclusion. What looks intriguing are the Hetzner server auctions. Didn't know ScaleWay yet. Will check them out too. Thanks
teknopaul
If you want lots of baremetal storage space for a test project put an old laptop on the Internet and use tinc to create a vpn that the laptop reconnects to if the network drops or changes IP. A cheapo virtual server $5/month with Linux can have terabytes of storage while the Internet is on at home. If you put the laptop behind a router security is not an issue. Cant beat this price. With second hand pc hardware this is essentially free storage. I live in bcn where domestic Internet is gigabit/fiber to the premises and never drops. yumv.
radu_floricica
Hetzner has a pretty nice VPS offering nowadays. Love their admin interface.
cfjgvjh
I love Hetzner dedicated server offerings since the price can't be beat, but they have mediocre peering/connection speeds.

Granted I'm in Japan, but I get like 1/12th the speed I do from an Scaleway dedi in France.

welterde
Might be worth pestering their support about it. There are lot of knobs the networking team can fiddle with to improve things.

For the traffic flowing from Hetzner to your ISP it's under the control of Hetzner which upstream provider they choose - and the choice might be sub-optimal right now. If the bottleneck is in the other direction you have to pester your own ISP about it.

zinekeller
Trying to stab here since the only clue I have is "from Japan" but maybe the connection is routed in Russia instead of routing via Asia/ME or US/CA/UK (more likely if the connection is from KDDI/au than NTT) and your Hetzner instance is in Finland. There are relatively few links from Japan to Russia (note that they are carrier links so they are unhampered by censoring) so connections are impacted that way. Maybe run a traceroute to check it, and then ask Hetzner and your ISP (be patient on your ISP, but sometimes you tend to be lucky) to fix this issue. Unfortunately short of running a VPN to a different uplink (Scaleway! OVH! The horror!) or switching to a different ISP with different uplink, there's nothing you can do about this.
ksec
I thought it goes without saying but let me expand on my post.

Cheap / Affordable, Semi / Fully Managed, High Spec ( CPU / Memory ), Connection Speed ( Latency and Bandwidth ), Data Allowance ( Actual Data you could use for your port ), Server / DC reliability, Support, Side Features ( Managed DB, DDoS, Backup Storage, CDN etc.. ), etc

Pick a few, but no host in the world is going to offer all of them. Generally speaking good Connection / route around the world are exceptionally expensive. So if that was a consideration in the first place ( Which the OP never mentioned and I assume it is not important ) you should not be looking for anything that looks "cheap".

Few years ago I thought OVH could have a shot at it, but it becomes increasingly clear they dont have much of that ambition or direction. Hetzner is even more conservatives and only wants to operate in Europe.

radu_floricica
Fair point, that's true. I'm in Romania, and even here I have occasional issues. Might even become reason to switch, if they keep recurring (haven't for a while).
gjvnq
Is you are in the US or Brazil, https://absam.io might be an interesting choice.

Their cheapest plan is 30 BRL (about 5.50 USD) for 1 GB or RAM and 50 GB of storage.

torqu3e
Racknerd with a discount code from lowendbox. They let you buy storage separately as well.
veeti
Have you considered cheap object storage providers like Backblaze B2?
achairapart
This is a good option. By offloading your storage you could save both money AND time, as there is no maintenance (don't underestimate that).

B2 also offers a compatible S3 API and it's something like $.005/Gb/Month.

sairamkunala
bandwidth through Cloudflare or the alliance they formed is free.
mobilio
Try Kimsufi or SoyouStart
stonesweep
If your project can to use old-CPU servers with TB sized drives in them (DIY bare metal), three providers I've found with the lowest prices: dacentec.com, joesdatacenter.com, nocix.net
dvfjsdhgfv
Hetzner SX - you get 40 TB storage for under €80/month, transfer included. It's hard to beat.
spiffytech
LowEndBox (the go-to site for bargain-bin deals on VPSs) has a page dedicated to preferred high-storage vendors: https://lowendbox.com/tag/highstorage/

I use LetBox for some projects and have been happy with them. Their high-storage plans go up to 10TB disk at $48.30/mo. In my experience their disk performance isn't stellar, but for lots of use cases it's more than adequate. Note that LetBox explicitly disallows media piracy on their servers (not your use case, but that's the context in which a lot of folks seek out high-storage servers). https://my.letbox.com/cart.php?a=confproduct&i=2

There's also WalkerServers. They rent out bare metal servers by the month, going up to 144TB at €255/mo. Their plans are more expensive than LetBox, but you should get better performance since it's bare metal, and if you buy your server in the Leaseweb datacenter, torrenting is allowed. The owner conducts a lot of customer service on Reddit and people seem pleased with his services.

Finally, for your specific use case, I would suggest considering AWS S3, Backblaze B2, or similar. Local disk space could easily be a limitation for folks looking to self-host image space; I have a friend with multiple TiB of images in Google Photos he's looking to move somewhere else. I have 30GiB of photos, which rules out lots of cheap VPS plans. Lots of folks also won't spring for more than the cheapest VPS plan they can get, or they'll load up your software on an old computer with modest storage. Local storage also makes your users responsible for backups/disk failures for some of the most important data they own, and most users really don't implement backup well. Putting the photos into a highly-durable, infinitely-scalable, cost-effective object store with push-button backup/versioning settings carries a lot of advantages for this sort of project. It doesn't have to be either/or -- you could support both -- but I definitely suggest supporting object stores.

fileeditview
Good input, thanks!

I agree that there certain limitations with local disk space. However one of my main objectives was to get my data away from cloud infrastructures. It sure is different to just put your photos on Google Images or pay for cloud storage which you access from your service.

Still I want to have full control over where and how my data is stored and I want a simple platform (at least for now, this is an MVP). So yes I agree that cloud storages have a clear value proposition but it is only an option for the future.

I also intend to at least offer some tools/reminders for backups. In the end it is the user's responsibility. Beside self-hosting on rented hardware I also think about putting a real box into my basement. This is obviously only a sensible solution for sharing in a small circle. But that's what my project was intended for.

I will again have a look at LowEndBox and also LetBox.

zxcvbn4038
I had not looked at VPS solutions in a while but in the US it looked to me like the majority are just reselling servers from a handful of data center operators - some sort of affiliate marketing setup. When you start comparing ip ranges and DC locations you see a pattern. Anyone else noticed this?
erikrothoff
Do you have any idea who these data center operators are? I’m looking to skip the middleman :)
pdimitar
Can anybody recommend affordable server hosting with ECC RAM?
ltn
Europe or US? Dedi or VPS? If you want really, really cheap have a look at offers at forums such as https://talk.lowendspirit.com/categories/offers - but be warned, those are mostly small to tiny companies, some even one-man shows, but you won't find anything cheaper. But good enough for personal projects and game servers.
chickentom
You don't write how much data you currently need, but I can recommend to start with time4vps and their storage VPS plans; https://www.time4vps.com/storage-vps/

I currently use their 9.99 EUR/mon plan with 2 TB storage for my Nextcloud installation.

Of course - at some point you will need more space and performance, and dedicated Hetzner (or similar) will be a better value-for-money option to continue with.

Matsta
As many have said, LowEndBox is a great resource. However it's not as updated as frequently as it used to be. The forums however are still very active: https://www.lowendtalk.com/

https://www.serverhunter.com/ is a solid site for searching for providers, much easier than using LEB.

BuyVM https://buyvm.net/ are my go to provider. Been using them for years and they are probably one of (if not the highest) ranked providers on LEB/LET. The recently upgraded all their nodes to Ryzen 3900X's and NVME SSD's.

Their block storage is stupid cheap at like $5 per 1tb - https://buyvm.net/block-storage-slabs/

7263255
If you need near-line storage, consider using AWS S3, Backblaze's B2 or DigitalOcean's Spaces. All of these will require some kind of transaction time to do things with the files (we're talking milliseconds to a couple of seconds).

If you need on-line storage, such as for a database, then consider AWS with a big EBS volume or Digital Ocean's Volume Block Store.

All of these can be used with the smallest/cheapest VPS instance types... so you can pay $2/month for a micro-sized EC2 reserved instance and attach a lot of storage. A downside to this is that most providers top out at 16TB, which might be a scaling problem depending on what your business is. Even small image hosts are in the multi-petabyte range.

Triv888
I pay $10/year for my VPS but it has only 10 or 15gb... Check out http://www.lowendstock.com/ for more options. Mine is probably as stable as Google's servers...
oarsinsync
Backblaze B2 storage + Cloudflare CDN fronting it.

Pay Backblaze for uploads + storage. Free download + distribution via Cloudflare.

Will scale with you.

freedomben
Second for Backblaze B2. I adopted it slowly but now I'm a massive fan. The pricing is just so reasonable for what you get and the tools/APIs are great.
cweagans
+1 from me as well. I've been using B2 a lot more lately and it's really just excellent. You could do a lot with a tiny Digital Ocean droplet for your application code + B2 & Cloudflare for serving assets.
tumidpandora
AWS Lightsail + S3
asignorini
I agree. They have a $3.5/month plan with 1 core, 512MB, 20GB and 1TB out that's hard to beat.

Depending on the use case you can mount an S3 bucket as local storage or integrate with the API and serve the images directly from there (either via one-time tokens or using hard to guess UUIDs).

If you want others to setup their-own quickly, you also need to consider providing some CloudFormation, Terraform, etc.