Veeble | Webdock | Milesweb | Cloudfanatic | Time4vps | Hetzner | Vpsdime | Zap-hosting
I'm looking for cheap VPS options. I'm trying to run Syncthing, a caldev server and maybe a searXng instance as well. Also what would be the catch with cheap VPS providers?
You know what sucks? Getting your VPS shut off or account suspended. All your data gone in an instant, not recoverable. You don't have access to the metal, and the metal no longer has access to you.
Hetzner is known for randomly boinking accounts. You update billing info? Whoops maybe shutoff. You login via a VPN, account disabled. Just randomly for no reason, account locked and VPS down.
You have basically zero recourse. Their support staff suck and the immediate reaction is suspend and delete. NEVER use them for anything you don't consider temporary.
I've used Hetzner for years without issue. Accessed through VPNs to the control panel without problems, changed password no issue, etc. I've never heard of them being "known for" the behavior you describe. This is just anecdote vs anecdote, though. I'd be interested to see some kinda evidence of what you're saying.
I also used them for years, then everything blocked and deleted instantly. I have other homelab type friends, same thing happened. Again more anecdote vs anecdote. But if you google about hetzner and this type of activity there are bagillions of reddit threads.
After paying them about a grand a month forever, losing all my "safe data" and having to wait a week for even a response that just says "account has suspicious activity. Disabled". Not a single response after that. And they had the nerve to charge my credit card again at the next payment period. Overall, truly scummy. And I will prevent everyone I can from ever engaging with them.
When hiccups happen, you would hope to be able to at least talk to someone and figure out what's going on. If they don't want to keep your business, fine let me get it out privately. But they don't play that way.
Any suggestions for bulk storage? I use their storage box for off-site backups of the nas critical data (a touch over 1TB). It's my tertiary backup (another off-site, a local full, and this) but I was testing it to replace my current off-site.
I've asked my vps provider about it, and it's on the roadmap but not yet ready, so I've been lightly searching around.
Purely for storage, no processing? I just finally got around to checking pricing and went with Backblaze B2. Not certain it’s the best, or cheapest, but I’m serving files out of it through cloudflare and it seemed to be a decent choice.
I use World Stream for many of my storage VPSs. They have pretty cheap servers that can take 14x or 18x drives. So I use their super powerful Epycs plus storage and then they can do an internal LAN only network for your boxes at 10G. 140TB to 200TB per box, connected to the rest of my stuff at 10G.
Their support is opposite of Hetzner. Everything is communicated. It's almost too much. You get emails that they're updating the air conditioning unit in a different building. Your downtime is zero. I've had some questions on setting up my rack space with them, and engineers respond back, not sales.
I use Hetzner exclusively and have just one complaint. You don't get much choice as to where your VPS is hosted country-wise nor the OS it runs. You do get the standard list of options, as you would with any other provider, except that list is quite small on Hetzner. It's good enough, I use Fedora everywhere and they support that so I'm good. Anyway, it's obviously free to create an account so there's no risk in case your setup isn't supported.
Apart from that, they're brilliant. The web console is nice, clean and well-designed, great value (1TB of storage clocks in at a few euros/month), room to scale and a decent company. Can't comment on customer support since I've never needed it.
For the services you've specified, that'll run you maybe 3 - 4 euros a month (that's with automatic backups of your entire server + tax) since you can run all of that under one server.
Agreed on Hetzner, although I have used customer support—to add another distro option. Sent them a web link, and they had it uploaded under my account by the next day.
I've been using Hetzner at work now for more than ten years and for my personal stuff for more than five. I haven't tried many others but I haven't had a reason to do so
I agree with you, recently moved to hetzner one of my vps's, ended up costing me almost 2 euro cheaper than vultr + higher specs.
Also have another auction dedicated server with them, which is really amazing for the price it costs me (hosting my lemmy instance/sharkey/... in total about 20 diff services plus a minecraft the 1.12.2 pack server ) the server barelly sees around 20% cpu usage on my grafana dashboard.
So from the point of price/performance hetzner is amazing.
It's not on your list but 1984. Iceland based, good for privacy, runs on renewable energy. You can install YUNOhost on it and easily run the things you mentioned plus a bunch of other stuff like email.
I dropped Akamai Connected Cloud (Formerly Linode) after the rebrand and price hike. Shifting everything over to Vultr was easy enough. They’re not a great VPS platform but in Linode’s absence there’s no real definitive platform. Digital Ocean is now probably the fan favorite I would guess.
When I searched for a cheap VPS I settled on IONOS's XS package (this 1€/month). It's one of the cheapest out there. Bonus is that it's a company we all recognise and can reasonably trust. And there are no weird gimmicks either; it's just straight forward.
One thing missing from this XS package compared to their other packages from IONOS is that there is no resource monitor on their web panel, which can be useful if you don't want to set up your own.
Geographic proximity doesn't necessarily relate to network proximity, but it's usually pretty close. Sometimes if a route is particularly bad, your traffic might go across the ocean and back.
I use netcup cheapest VPS server, so far it runs SearXNG, Shaarli and Miniflux all dockerized and they all run without problems, given the fact that they are all single user instances.