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Ask HN: Cheap VPS with 1TB HDD?

53 points by rambojazz ↗ HN
I need to host a static website with several 100s GB of text files. I'm looking for a small VPS that has however 1TB of HDD. 1 CPU, 1GB RAM, 100Mb NET are more than enough for the purpose. Unfortunately all the VPS plans that I can find do not allow for such small requirements with that much storage. They only scale the whole VPS, so if I want 1TB storage I would have to buy like 8-thread CPUs, 64GB RAM, 1Gb NET etc. I know there are "storage VPSes" but these do not allow webservers, they only work as network storage and it means I would have to pay for 2 VPSes. Any recommendations?

43 comments

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nreece
RamNode has a KVM VPS range with 1 TB HDD storage for $15/month.

I've used their VPSs many years ago, and they were excellent in terms of performance and support. Nick, the owner, has sold the company since then, and I haven't used them lately, so I'm not sure about their current standing, but worth giving them a try.

The other option can be to store the text files as objects on Backblaze B2 or Cloudflare R2 for cheap.

sylvain_kerkour
I would put the files on a S3-like service (scaleway, backblaze...) and setup a small VPS to serve the files.

By using Scaleway you would pay ~12€/m for 1TB of storage and ~7€/m for the smallest instance (can go even cheaper if you manage to get a stardust instance at ~1.5€/m). Also, Scaleway does not charge for egress (bandwidth) so it seems the perfect solution to your problem :)

Alternatively, you could enable the website feature[0] on the bucket to save you from setting up a web server, but then you would pay for the egress.

[0]: https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/storage/object/how-to/use-b...

Disclaimer: I'm just an happy customer

d1sxeyes
As far as I see, Scaleway egress is 75 GB free every month then €0.01/GB, so not completely free.
sylvain_kerkour
If you serve the files directly from their S3-like service. If you have a proxy instance then it's free :)

Internet -> instance -> S3 = free egress

Internet -> S3 = $$ egress

fbcpck
I am actually not familiar with such limitations with storage VPS against webservers. It doesn't seem to be the norm, and I would still search with "Storage VPS" as search keyword in e.g. https://lowendtalk.com.

I've personally used the following in the past. It was quite cheap and generally happy with it.

https://www.time4vps.com/storage-vps/

———

You might also want to get (snipe) a server off https://www.kimsufi.com/uk/servers.xml — the best ones usually sold out within a minute or two, but nothing beats the price.

midasz
Really easy to use changedetection.io to snipe one of these. Did it a few weeks ago, they become available rather often but indeed disappear within a couple of minutes.
KronisLV
Also a fellow customer of Time4VPS and this is perhaps one of the few times I've seen them mentioned on HackerNews.

That said, with their Storage VPS offerings the OSes that they offer may or may not be suitable for your needs: https://www.time4vps.com/knowledgebase/what-os-do-you-offer/...

Personally I'd suggest that you do not publicly expose such an OS but rather have it act as a NFS mount for another VPS with a newer OS release.

Also, while they offer backups (with restoring them being a manual and paid process), no such option is available for the Storage VPS offering, you can see that much being stated in the FAQ at the bottom of the page.

Once again, I rather enjoy their services and they're a relatively local company so I'm glad to support them, but at the same time Hetzner is pretty much on par with what they offer, with time based billing (instead of per month) and a nice UI: https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box (though I had to verify my ID when I signed up with them, which was inconvenient and actually had my attempt be denied a few years ago until recently when it worked, not sure what that was about)

Furthermore, you might also look at the offerings by Contabo, though their performance isn't exactly excellent and there are setup fees and their UI looks antiquated (but the service itself is okay): https://contabo.com/en/storage-vps/

I think most options out there will have certain drawbacks, since for whatever reason the status quo is to have smaller packages so whatever backing resources the servers have can probably be split up nicely amongst the customers' instances, thus making storage optimized VPSes something of a niche product.

Approx. price per the recommended setups (no public facing EOL distros) for 1TB of data, per month (divided when yearly billing applicable):

  Time4VPS (storage VPS + container VPS), new client, monthly: 3.99 EUR + 1.99 EUR = 5.98 EUR
  Time4VPS (storage VPS + container VPS), new client, yearly: 3.33 EUR + 1.66 EUR = 4.99 EUR
  Time4VPS (storage VPS + container VPS), regular prices, monthly: 7.99 EUR + 3.99 EUR = 11.98 EUR
  Time4VPS (storage VPS + container VPS), regular prices, yearly: 6.66 EUR + 3.33 EUR = 9.99 EUR
  Hetzner (storage space + VPS): 3.45 EUR + 4.15 EUR = 7.6 EUR
  Contabo (300 GB + 700 GB storage VPS): 3.99 EUR + 7.99 EUR = 11.98 EUR
  Contabo (1400 GB storage VPS): 12.99 EUR
Out of curiosity, here's an example of what it might cost with block storage offerings:

  Hetzner (block storage + VPS): 48.74 EUR + 4.15 EUR = 52.89 EUR
  DigitalOcean (block storage + VPS): 96.26 EUR + 4.81 EUR = 101.07 EUR
  Vultr (block storage + VPS): 96.26 EUR + 5.78 EUR = 102.04 EUR
  Scaleway (block storage + Stardust VPS): 58.40 EUR + 1.82 EUR = 60.22 EUR
(figures might be inaccurate because of VAT, just an example of the ballpark that we're in)
malteg
Try contabo.com Have good experience with them. They are now available outside the EU too. You can choose between ssd and hdd. If you really price sensitive and need a cheap vps give netcup.eu a try (eu only)
lovelearning
I use a Hetzner CX11[1] VPS running nginx. Files are stored on Hetzner's 1TB Storage Box service. Storage Box has built-in WebDAV HTTP interface (among others). Costs about €6.50/month in all.

You might also want to see their Storage Share[3] service - similarly priced but more user-friendly with a NextCloud frontend and WebDAV HTTP interface.

From another discussion here, I found that Backblaze B2 and Cloudflare R2 are still cheaper. May want to check them out too.

[1]: https://www.hetzner.com/cloud

[2]: https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box

[3]: https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share

sph
After years at Linode and Digital Ocean, I'm surprised how cheap Hetzner is.

Less than €4/mo for 1TB of storage is an incredible price. It would be $100 per month at Linode, they don't even offer snapshots and last I tried the IOPS limit was abysmal. DO is probably the same thing.

flexd
Yeah! No idea why I still have a VPS at Digital Ocean compared to this. For a Basic / 4 GB / 2 vCPUs (aka shared cpu 4GB ram) instance I'm ending up at like $28.5 per month including VAT ($20 droplet + some backups). Looks like I could literally get 4x the RAM for the same cost on Hetzner!?
sph
That's what I did last month, moved everything over to Hetzner, paying the same price for twice the machine.
aleku
Am doing my migration at the moment. I couldn't believe for 1/3 of the cost at DO, I was getting a similar VPS at Hetzner.
lovelearning
You’re probably referring to Linode’s block storage. These Hetzner services are like Linode’s object storage service.

Hetzner too has block storage volumes but they cost more than storage boxes. I think block storage typically costs more because it supports higher IOPS.

sph
Not really. Linode's object storage presents an S3 interface. Hetzner is more low-level: it's got FTP, SMB, WebDAV and they say it can be used as a network volume.

EDIT: Hetzner's Cloud Volume, which is an actual mountable block device and backed by an SSD, is €48/mo for 1TB, still half as cheap as Linode.

warrenm
The storage box isn't an object store - it's basically a CIFS share off a fileserver
vladstudio
came here to write exactly the same comment:-) CX11 VPS with 1tb storage box mounted as webdav disk. works well, costs almost nothing.
lioeters
Yup, same here, was going to comment about Hetzner's Storage Box. I'm using sshfs to mount it on the VPS, and it's pretty slow but acceptable for my purposes.
jasfi
The cheap VCPUs Hetzner offers aren't dedicated. So what's the performance like? Does anyone know how this compares to AWS Lightsail?
hardwaresofton
I've found that I needed a CPX11 to do serious work -- but the average simple Rails/Node app could probably run on less than that.

They do make it really easy to upgrade, so if you write a decent UserData script (or build your images with packer and deploy them with pulumi/terraform) you'll be able to easily go from zero to functional no matter the size, and you can scale up as needed.

b3lvedere
Thank you for mentioning the Hetzner storage box. It's an amazing storage deal.
indigodaddy
buyvm.net 1G Ram KVM for $3.50/mo Add 1TB block storage slab for $5/mo
dusted
Wouldn't it be easier to self host ? Sounds like something that could be lifted by a raspberry pi 4 and a 1 TiB usb harddrive?
bbrks
Use one of the notification websites to grab a $5.99/mo KS-1 from kimsufi (OVHcloud) - it should be in stock multiple times a day

It's a tiny dedicated server that should be plenty sufficient. I run all my personal infra on these (and the higher spec ones) and they're great for the price.

Intel ATOM N2800 2c/4t 1.86GHz 4GB DDR3 1066MHz 1TB 100 Mbps

ev1
I think they ran out of 1TBs, I have 40 of these and they're all 2TB now. If your drive fails it will probably be replaced with a 2...
warrenm
>I know there are "storage VPSes" but these do not allow webservers

Never seen this anywhere

The "storage VPS" just means they're focusing on storage over CPU or RAM ...they're still full VPS instances

hardwaresofton
Shameless plug, but if you're looking for a cheap VPS and don't want to run the backing services that might be required by the application/whatever you're trying to host, I'm working on something to offer some basic (and later advanced) managed services on Hetzner.

I think Hetzner's great (it's definitely the right choice in here), but it is missing some features we've come to expect from low cost but robust cloud providers (DO, Linode, etc) -- Managed S3 storage, simple Database as a service, etc. I'm working on a sort of... proto-cloud that can sit on providers like Hetzner, OVH and LeaseWeb and offer this functionality.

My thing is called NimbusWS (https://nimbusws.com), but there are other things:

- Elestio: https://elest.io/

- Symbiosis: https://symbiosis.host (they offer managed k8s, they run on Hetzner IIRC)

Mikealcl
I’m very interested on a personal level, not doing ops professionally atm, but my usage is still pretty crazy personally, what are my best resources to learn/relate your platform?
hardwaresofton
Sorry a bit late, but as I’ll be running pretty common F/OSS projects I can say that for the most part the UI I’m going for is click to deploy and be done (get a URL for your redis instance/cluster, you have to slot that in).

Early on I won’t be supporting running custom code — so it will basically only be backing services!

If you wouldn’t mind emailing me I can give you access to the documentation early —- we will obviously live and die by documentation so probably best to stay there

antihero
I use PulseHeberg Storage Cloud VPS, works great, is cheap and uses KVM so you can roll your own distro/kernel.

Emails will be in French mind, which doesn’t really bother me.

Performance is fine, happily/needlessly serving my static website and navidrome using microk8s on one of the slightly beefier boxes.

https://pulseheberg.com/cloud/vps-storage

matt_heimer
If they are uncompressed text files, have you considered compressing them on disk? Nginx has gzip_static and gunzip options that will allow you to serve the content from pre-compressed files.
antifa
According to the google cloud calculator, before bandwidth charges, an f1-micro VPS (0.60 GB RAM) is $3.88/month and 1TB of disk for the VPS is $40/month.

I think the free tier will give you a free forever 1GB e2-micro, so you might be able to get that then only pay for the $40 GB disk and outbound bandwidth.

B2 backblaze is an S3 compatible API that will hold 1TB for $60/year before bandwidth charges.

The bandwidth charges might kill these 2 ideas for you, but cloudflare or bunnycdn might be worth looking into to hide gcloud or B2 behind.

paddim8
Is it really worth paying 5-10x as much though? What's the benefit of using these over eg. Hetzner?
antifa
> Is it really worth paying 5-10x as much though?

As much as what?

> What's the benefit of using these over eg. Hetzner?

I'm not familiar with European webhosts.

throwaway67743
An alternative suggestion if you don't need the VPS benefits (ie root), feral sell reasonably cheap shell accounts from 1 to 8tb (won't link just in case, but easy to find on Google)
stevenicr
I've enjoyed leaseweb having dedicated servers (when on sale) for half the price of many 'modern' vps slingers.. eg:

CPU 1x 4 cores 3.30GHz SYS-5037MC-H12TRF 2 SFF bays ram 16GB DDR3 hdd 1x1TB SATA traffic 10 TB Availability 1 hr - 5 days US$43.64 per month - ( https://www.leaseweb.com/bare-metal-server/configure/27128?c... )

yeah that's not apples to apples - it's not an SSD drive - those are more for that size, but it sounds like you are looking for price and likely do not need to spend the extra dough for SSD.

aae42
wasabi will sell you 1TB of object storage for 5.99/mo
kkielhofner
Cloudflare and Backblaze B2 - nothing else will even come close for the price point.

Either put the static files in the bucket or use Cloudflare Pages.

Will be around $5/mo and you get ddos protection, edge caching, etc, etc.

If you want to experiment Cloudflare is free and the first 10GB on B2 are free.

mobilio
Why you didn't host this at home?

Get some Intel NUC and 1T disk. Install everything and use CloudFlare Tunnel to expose server via CF to the internet.

jjice
If it's static and there is no server side code running at all, you might be able to get away with raw S3-like + a CDN in front. No servers to manager, and it'll be relatively cheap.