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Ask HN: Apart DO and Linode, are there other good alternatives?

19 points by pdappollonio ↗ HN
I've been seeing several startups hosted in other companies than DO and Linode. It will be good to know for new companies to have few clues regarding other cheap services where you can host your development projects while you, well, 'develop' them.

I saw someone telling in another thread that, for example, RamNode.com is a well placed offer there, too.

19 comments

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general_failure
Ramnode does not have a api if that matters.

Ec2 is an alternative. They have SSD these days.

latch
I recently discovered Vultr [1]. Slightly cheaper than DO with lots of location. I only had a couple instances running up for a bit while I benchmarked some code (I wasn't benchmarking them, so I didn't compare it to someone else). Was alright.

I run my own "everything" box at Hetzner [2] and I've used OVH (France, though they had a DC in Canada). OVH has gotten confusing, a lot of different brands (SoYouStart, OVH, Kimsufi and all types of stocking issues...so I'll let you google it if you really want). Both of these completely decimate pretty much anything else for the price.

Finally, there was a recent story about Atlantic.net offering a 0.99 SSD-backed VPS [3]

[1] https://www.vultr.com/

[2] http://www.hetzner.de/en/

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8389477

mrlinx
Just wish there was one option where I could download my snapshots. Untrap my images!
ZenoArrow
Isn't that a good use case for Docker?
atmosx
Yes that's exactly what docker is about.
rubiquity
As others have pointed out, there is Docker which is great for this. There is also Packer[0] from the team that built Vagrant and other great tools. Packer allows you to build images for several different IaaS providers.

0 - http://www.packer.io/

lsllc
+1 for Vultr: They offer FreeBSD and CoreOS.
atmosx
I use FreeBSD at TransIP but their virtualisation engine is not suitable for running Ruby applications[1]. Other than that, I didn't had any other issues. They are a bit expensive though (12 EUR/month for 1GB Ram 50 GB SSD).

[1] https://gist.github.com/atmosx/14efea27eb2c1e38af09

joshmn
If you want the best bang for your buck, check out RunAbove [1] We've found them to be excellent: performant, good people behind them, and the value is unmatched.

[1] http://RunAbove.com

Disclaimer: Really, really happy customer.

marketingadvice
OVH is awesome, super affordable but its dedicated boxes mostly.

Heroku is another option but quite expensive.

kngspook
Slicehost, now owned by Rackspace and rebranded accordingly I think, used to be almost exactly the same as Linode. To the point where, when I was picking my first VPS box, I narrowed it down to those two, and then ended up picking based on how pretty their websites were.
nreece
You can find many on http://lowendbox.com
shiftpgdn
Lowendbox was bought by ChicagoVPS and basically exists to serve as a shill forum for their many many brands. VPSBoard.com is a neutral third party site where many low end boxers went to.
hackerboos
ChicagoVPS who were hacked.

Many of their customers lost data including myself.

stevekemp
Many of the sites that used to get posted there were doing so in a last desperate effort to gain clients and become profitable.

That meant sites would get listed, get clients, then fold.

If price is your sole concern, and you can (re)deploy quickly, easily, and have good monitoring in place, then it was a reasonable place to go. If not you'd be better picking a reliable brand with history.

thenomad
I run a few servers with Bytemark's BigV, which is very good. Definitely a solid alternative for UK-based cloud hosting. A bit more expensive than DO but much more customisable also.

I've heard good things about RamNode, especially performance-wise. Haven't tested them.

avinassh
I use Ramnode and I am really happy. The speeds and performance is really good. However Ramnode does not provide any API like Digital Ocean. They use SolusVM for VM management, which has some API endpoints, but nothing fancy.