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Ask HN: Cheap dedicated hosting options for side projects
122 points by webtechgal on July 6, 2016 | hide | past | favorite | 117 comments
Hello all,

I have a few side projects (all web apps) that would require sizable amounts of storage space (but not much of other resources) once I bring them live, so I've been searching for cheap dedicated hosting options.

If huge space requirement was not a constraint, I'd say Digital Ocean (or other low-cost cloud services like Linode, Vultr etc.) would provide great bang for the buck, but I'm talking hundreds rather than tens of gigs of storage here at which levels, DO etc. would be way beyond my reach, and out of the question.

After some research, I have found what I believe to be the cheapest dedicated box provider and before signing up there, I thought I'd run it by HN, for other opinions, suggestions etc. What do you all think?

https://www.kimsufi.com/us/en/servers.xml




Here's an option you might not have considered, but might be applicable, depending on the read/write speeds you need from those hundreds of gigabytes of data. Amazon has cloud drive, which costs something like 50 bucks a year, and has unlimited storage.

The neat thing is someone created a FUSE file system called acd_cli that allows you to use the cloud drive as if it were a normal hard drive. The speeds aren't too shabby either; I easily get 150MB/s up and down on my dedicated server, and response times are snappy. Additionally, you can create a unionfs mount so that writes are instant, and you sync new files on a regular schedule.

Of course, that might not be applicable to your use case, but I use mine for many things. I have a plex server running using that with over 13TB of videos, and it works flawlessly. It allows me to run a full plex server with unlimited storage for 20 bucks a month.


I have the same issue. Running a Plex server (~6TB) at home, and thinking I need to put my media in a more accessible location. Are you using Amazon Drive as the one true source and syncing it locally to use with your Plex Server? Or are you pulling/streaming directly from ACD?


Please keep in mind that Amazon is running a variant of content-id and may mistakenly think that your files are infringing someones rights:

https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/4j7wex/any_plex_users... https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/4j5fsi/after_s...


As I mentioned in another comment, you can avoid all that by using encfs, which encrypts the files before they ever reach amazon.

Edit: Just read the first reddit post. I call BS on anyone using encfs consistently and receiving a legitimate email from Amazon. Unless they've broken strong encryption, there's just no way.


Or they could just be using it as an excuse to get rid of high usage (non profitable) users. Encrypted files + you use a lot of storage and bandwidth = get kicked off.


My setup is a little convoluted. I've found that using the write mount really slows me down, so I use a unionfs mount with the writes going to the local hard drive, and the cloud drive being the primary read source. Given that it's unionfs though, anything that I haven't synced will be read from the hard drive.

So the order goes: Sonarr/CouchPotato -> Local Hard Drive -> Amazon Cloud Drive -> Plex. I stream directly off the cloud drive for any file older than an hour, as that's my upload interval.


nice. so you read from ACD, because you're mainly writing to local? Or is there another reason for NOT reading from local? also, does local completely mirror ACD, or have you found a way around that?


It doesn't mirror it at all. The local stuff is only a temporary holding place for it to sit until it gets uploaded to ACD, at which point it is unceremoniously deleted. I have >10TB on my cloud drive, but I'm using <10GB on my hard drive.


Great! Going to give this a try.


Give me a shout if you need any help. I know HN doesn't have private messaging, but you can reach me on IRC on Freenode at AMorpork.


will do, thanks for the offer!


Fyi, you might want to check this out (scroll to the bottom and start with the first post): https://amc.ovh/


exactly what i needed.


I can +1 that. It's definitely not an A->B->C, but it's enough to get you 95% of the way there.


maybe you guys are using Plex for nothing but family vacation videos and publicly licensed content; but, no way in hell I would use 3rd party storage for my plex setup.

On the otherhand, that's a kickass storage setup though.


I use encfs on top of all of that, which means there's no possible way for Amazon to see my files.


Do you have any thoughts on encfs vs. duplicity? http://duplicity.nongnu.org/


They serve different purposes, and I actually use both for different reasons. Encfs is seamless, it's encryption that doesn't impede normal operations. You can just mount it and you're off to the races.

Duplicity on the other hand is a backup solution. I use it to back up my mail server to S3. It's super handy for that, but it really couldn't be used with plex seamlessly like encfs could be.


Just family home videos for me ;)


I've tried this, but I've had sync issues in the past. Also have they gotten rid of their 2GB file upload limit?


Recent versions of acd_cli have largely fixed all the issues I've had in the past. I've found that essentially all issues can be solved by not writing directly to the cloud drive, but using a unionfs and uploading on a cron job.

There is no 2gb limit that I have run into. I just checked and I have several >30GB videos uploaded to my cloud drive, so I can safely say there is no issue there.

Edit: For some completeness, here's how I have everything mounted and syncing.

  acdcli mount /mnt/amazon_real --interval 30000000 -ao --uid 112 --gid 118

  unionfs-fuse -o cow /mnt/cache=RW:/mnt/amazon_real=RO /mnt/amazon -o allow_other

  0 * * * * acdcli upload --remove-source-files /mnt/cache/* /TV/ --max-connections 10; acdcli sync
And that's it. The last one is a cronjob that runs every hour, if that wasn't obvious.


I get that you probably tweaked this a bit for posting, but I see a disconnect that is relevant to how I want to set this up.

In the first line you mounted your whole Cloud Drive at /mnt/amazon_real. On the 3rd line you upload from /mnt/cache to /TV/.

Do you actually have a subset of the cloud drive mounted at /mnt/amazon_real? I tried to do that some time ago with acd_cli but wasn't able.


Whoops. The truth is I have 2 cron jobs, one running on the hour to upload TV, and another 30 after to upload movies. I meant to simplify it to just syncing the entire thing for the post, but I neglected to do that properly.

I have not looked into only mounting a section of it.


Former Cloud-Driver here. We launched a significant upgrade to the back-end just before I left, which technically speaking does not have the 2GB limit. That being said, I don't know if there aren't any artificial constraints. I was just responsible for the bits :D


Thanks for the reply. I use Cloud Drive more for archival purposes than anything else and up to this point I have been RARing my files into 1.5GB chunks.


- If latency isn't an issue you could store your things on Backblaze [1] which is by far the cheapest storage I've found.

- For my high-storage requirements I rent a dedicated Hetzner server with 2x3TB disks for around 30 euro/month [2]

[1] https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html

[2] https://robot.your-server.de/order/market/country/DE


Since the OP indicated elsewhere that the storage need not be local on the machine, Backblaze is almost certainly the best answer.

500 GB of Backblaze B2 storage is $2.50 / month

Pair that with a $5 DigitalOcean droplet and the need is met for a grand total of $7.50 / month.


Wow!!! DO being a favorite of mine, I will definitely try to explore this. My concern, however, is what about the bandwidth between DO and Backblaze? How would that count/work?


Bandwidth into both B2 and DigitalOcean is free, bandwidth OUT of them is metered (or in the case of DO you get a bucket of bandwidth to start and then it's metered past that bucket).


Also there appears to be no way in the dashboard of DO to see bandwidth usage. I don't know where they say it's metered after that, because they just slowed down the speed severely when my server went over, rendering it useless for its purpose without warning.


digital ocean charges $0.02/gb after your vm quota is used up.

fyi, amazon/google charges above $0.10/gb


new Hetzner root servers: -

https://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver

- i7-6700 ; 32Gb - 64 GB ; HDD or SSD : from 46.41 € Price/Month + Once-off Setup Fee

or https://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-h...


Depends more on your usage requirements:

- If you're basically just doing a backup and not reading data very often, Backblaze B2 is a good choice, as storage only costs 0.005$/GB (1TB is $5). However if you're reading kinda often, I'd recommend against it, as it's not the fastest to read and bandwidth is 5c/GB (it's mainly intended for backup use cases).

- If you're doing a backup and REALLY not reading data very often, Online.net's C14 is a good choice. Storage is only EUR 0.002/GB (EUR 2/TB) but reading/writing (known as "operation" on their pages) costs EUR 0.01/GB.

- If you need a decent/low latency network, I'd pay for Google Cloud Storage or something similar.

- If you're doing basically anything else, I'd recommend a server from Kimsufi (as you've found), SoYouStart, Online.net, Hetzner or OVH.

- If you're fine with something _really_ low end, another user pointed out time4vps.eu which offers the lowest cost online storage I've seen (EUR 0.002/GB) with RAM, a CPU and bandwidth attached.


I frequently lurk on LowEndTalk forums; if you don't mind using vps from not-so-known providers, these are the two best storage vps deals on it:

» Time4VPS (https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/85707/)

1TB Storage for €48 bienially. Double the storage for double price.

» ZXHost (https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/85803/)

1TB Storage for €45 annually. Offer has ended though; but they might do it again in the future so I'll leave it here.

—

Otherwise, go for kimsufi/ovh/soyoustart/hetzner/scaleway special offer dedicated servers. They are the cheapest you can get for non-random providers.


Wow!! I actually have a 20GB instance with Time4VPS, that I had found via an ad on LowEndTalk last year. I think I paid some Euro 9 or something for the WHOLE YEAR!! Other than an annoying glitch that causes the space allocation to drop down to 10GB instead of 20GB at random, it has been working quite well too.

However, I didn't know they had had the 1TB offer - I'll put in a ticket there asking them to let me know if/when it comes up again. Thanks for the info.


We have those offers (high volume storage servers) for some time now and they are not going to disappear.


have experience with OVH and Hetzner both companies offer a stable service and their prices look too good to be real (and yet they are real)


I am using https://online.net, works good so far.


If you can put up with the latency to France.


Looks quite promising, and well within my price range (under $10) too. In fact, their Personal Range appears to be cheaper and config-wise superior to even Kimsufi!! I will surely check this out. @jagger27, for a WAHM from India, be it France/US/UK or whatever, they're all the same. :-)


Delimiter's full-ha cloud gives you 250GB space, 1 CPU, 1GB RAM for $6/month.

You could add more CPU/more RAM for just a few pennies. Disk space scales to 50TB per disk quite cheaply.

https://cc.delimiter.com/cart/cloud-resource-pool/

Another option is ObjSpace (S3 compatible storage) but that would require you to run S3FS or similar. http://delimiter.com/objspace-object-storage/

[disclaimer I work for Delimiter]


TransIP sells you DigitalOcean-like VPSs, but also allow you to attach multi-TB NAS drives to them for a few bucks more. I've been a happy customer with a 2TB drive for a few years.

https://www.transip.eu/vps/big-storage/


I highly recommend Scaleway. https://www.scaleway.com/


Looks like with their lowest tier bare metal server + 450 GB additional storage the total would be 11.99 Euros per month or $13.28 USD. And there wouldn't be transfer cost between server / storage.


I use OVH. Kimsufi is basically the same company. I think it is their low end alias or white label.

I think Kimsufi limits you to 100Mbps which might not be enough bandwidth speed if you plan on server video or other large files to a bunch of people at once. OVH gives you a 1 Gbps unlimited pipe included.

https://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/storage/


Kimsufi are a great low-cost provider, I ran an Atom dedi with a 1TB disk with them for 2 years at around £12 a month. Never had any problems - great bandwidth to move data around, mostly used the big disk for offsite backups. However, an important consideration - they don't adjust their pricing for existing customers or allow the hardware to be upgraded. Around the 2-year mark, they dropped the price for the same server to just £3 a month and doubled the RAM. I was told if I wanted it, I'd have to give up my current server and move everything to a brand-new one. They wouldn't drop the price, and when I asked about doubling the RAM, was told it wasn't an option. They then put the price of my dedi up not a month later. I cancelled the server and have run my own hardware since then.

Good for a specific use, but as the low price implies, there is no option to scale in future.


Thanks for all this info. Just out of curiosity, when they offered the same config as your £12/mo box for £3/mo and refused to reduce your billing, could you not have simply bought the cheaper one, taken a snapshot of the existing server, transferred it over to the new one and discontinued the older one?


I couldn't have done so using the KS dashboard, for example. As it was Linux, I could have cloned the machine fairly easily, but it seemed silly to me to go to all that trouble, essentially throwing away the original server and starting again.

At the time, my need for a hosted machine was decreasing so I didn't want to expend much effort anyway.


At https://MNX.io we introduced an SSD cached storage VPS server -- 500GB starting at $7/month, available up to 40TB at $15/TB.


I remember when you guys were first starting out :) I think we emailed back and forth. Nice to see you guys are here!


OVH Public Cloud Object Storage. It's $ 0.01 per GB for storage and transfer. Triple replicated with datacenters in Europe and Canada. It uses Open Stack Swift which has a nice api and tools.


Assuming it's possible (i.e. you don't need a POSIX file system), your best bet might be to use an Object Store like S3. It will most likely be by far the most cost effective solution.


Thanks. S3 would work fine for me (from a tech perspective), but the question is, would it offer ~500 GB storage for under $10/mo?


According to their calculator[1], it's $15. Less than $10 seems unreasonably low for what you're asking.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/


You can use S3FS (https://github.com/s3fs-fuse/s3fs-fuse) to mount your buckets and make it look like just another directory using /etc/fstab


Just chiming in with my experience. I have several different servers for personal projects on various OVH properties. So Kimsufi, SoYouStart, and OVH proper. They have all been great. The VPS option at OVH was nice too. 100Mbit connection, several TB of bandwidth for $5 / month. Never ran into any issues with their services, and will continue to use them for everything. Much better deal than anything else I have found.


I use Kimsufi for a load of small side projects. AFAIK they are decommissioned OVH servers. You lose RAID as well as some other features like fail-over IPs.


That's great, thanks!! How about uptime and support/response issues? Of course, I am not expecting any fancy support for < $10/mo., but just to know, have you had any issues and 1st-hand experiences?


I've had a few boxes from them for a few years, they've been pretty solid. Once I had a server go offline, I got an email from them saying they'd detected an issue, another 10 minutes later saying they'd found a problem with a network connector and it was fixed. I bought an extra server for a month once and the automated system had some issues which meant I didn't get the login info, took them about a day to fix it and get back to me.


Uptime has been 100% as far as I can tell and their help and response to issues have been good too. They were really good assisting me in getting drive replaced on my main OVH server as well as setting up the failover IPs between that and a backup Kimsufi one (that was before they stopped offering failover to kimsufi ones).


Use their VPS. Not oversold. Latest CPU. ECC RAM. RAID storage. Was $3/m with their 30% off promo recently. Put a single service on a single VPS. Order a few extra. Will make testing things much easier.


I use: https://indiehosters.net If you care about privacy you will land in the right hands, and you will support an interesting project on its own: http://www.wired.com/2014/11/indie-hosters/


Seen as you already mention Vultr as an option they actually have dedicated block storage plans: https://www.vultr.com/pricing/blockstorage/

A 500GB SSD is $50/month which seems fairly reasonable. You can use it directly with a cheap VPS from them as well.


That's useful to know, but as mentioned in my original post, what I basically require is a dedi box and since Kimsufi is offering one with 500GB for under $10/mo., the Vultr offer won't make much commercial sense to me. Thanks anyway.


If you're already paying Dropbox there's a terabyte of space that might be useful with bonus backups, versioning and undeleting, a CLI too:

http://www.dropboxwiki.com/tips-and-tricks/using-the-officia...


You could go with hetzner. They recently had a special for a 64GB with 2x4TB hard drives for $54, and do a bunch of VMs on it.


FYI, DigitalOcean is rolling out expandable block storage summer 2016 (so any day now), so that might be a good way to go. Not a lot of information, but keep an eye on https://www.digitalocean.com/features/storage/. You may be able to ask support to manually add you to the beta if you need it right now. DigitalOcean is really good about going out of their way to win your business. Full disclosure: I have no relationship to DO other than being a happy customer.

If you're looking at mostly static assets though, why not just upload them to S3 and serve them directly from there (or via a Cloudfront distribution)? EC2 boxes are fairly inexpensive as well, and there's all kind of automation tools for provisioning your AWS resources + configuring them.


+1 on DigitalOcean with Block Storage. Currently using DO with Amazon S3 mounted using /etc/fstab via S3FS https://github.com/s3fs-fuse/s3fs-fuse (which has eventual consistency but if you want cheap)


Kimsufi's problem is the lack of redundancy, if the single drive on a box dies then you're not going to see your data again.

However, given the low price you could rent them in pairs and replicate the data using something like DRBD. Depending on your comfort level, this can be a very viable and cost effective option, or a system administration nightmare. If it's the latter, then definitely look into an object storage solution if your applications are compatible with that.

By the way, I've written an ebook which tries to help people make sense of the various hosting options available on the market today, perhaps it can be useful to you. The book site is

https://www.hostingforappdevelopers.com


>given the low price you could rent them in pairs and replicate the data using something like DRBD

I'd be worried with this drive 2 is sitting 30cm from drive 1 so if something physical happened at the site itself your data is gone vs multi site coverage.


Mine are mainly experimental apps, so the data redundancy is not really that important, but yes, at some point in time, if the need arises, I can get another box like you said, and may be just rsync everything via a daily cron job or something I suppose.


The one's listed here are great. Been using one for over a year now.

http://oneprovider.com/dedicated-servers/paris-france


I use kimsufi to host a side project and so far they have been really good. Switched away from Hetzner.

Running multiple dockerized applications on a dedicated host is a good way to save on running costs until things pick up speed.


The best bang for buck I have found so far for large storage hosting is the slot hosting option from http://www.delimiter.com, where you mail in your own hard-drive and they provide you with a local VPS that can mount it in an Atlanta data center for $100/yr. I sent a 6TB drive. I then run other cheap VPS's (usually on the east coast for lower latency) that mount the drive via sshfs.


Low end dedicated servers/virtual private servers http://www.lowendbox.com/


Almost everyone here suggest Object Storage which I too think is the best option for your case. Then you can modulate computing power or even technology (VPS, cloud instance, PaaS, or containers) as you will.

Some providers like us (I am CEO at Exoscale) bill the compute by the minute and allow to resize the direct attached disk even on small 5$/mo 512mb instances.


I know what you mean about needing a solution with lots of storage. I have Linode servers, and I'm at 90% disk space usage on one of them. They just upgraded the ram on all servers, but what I really need is more disk space. I'm nowhere near hitting the bandwidth limit, just need more space.


I use https://backupsy.com/ - essentially a cheap VPS with slow but generous storage options.

I think ovh also has an option for 'lots of space but don't worry about the other things'.


Check out Dediserve - https://dediserve.com. They let you customise the resources (including SSD and NAS storage) as per your needs. Moreover, their performance and support are great too.


"would require sizable amounts of storage space (but not much of other resources)"

Self-hosting would be your best option if your bandwidth needs are modest. Your data is 'small' enough to fit on a local drive.


Have you checked out ServerHub? They are very generous with storage; http://serverhub.com/vps/ssd-cached


Are these static websites or do the apps need to write to the storage space?


The sites/apps will be writing (as well as reading) ALL the time... One of them is a (proprietary) web crawler that will crawl and archive certain types of web resources. (Mainly RSS/XML feeds). Then, another one will crawl/archive URLs, take a screen shot of the URLs too and store them as gif/jpeg/png files.


What sort of static website would need that much storage?


Something like a self-hosted pyvideo.org would probably take a few TBs.


Even that has a search option. I suppose you might want to host a large number of big downloads.


You can have search using only browser-side JS, by generating a static index: http://10consulting.com/2013/03/06/jekyll-and-lunr-js-static...


I use OVH SSD VPS (the cheapest offer) and it has been working nicely for me.

However if you select your server to be in a region requests from other regions might be a bit slow.


Github let's you host static pages for free. Mega gives you 50GB free storage. Amazon EC2 has a nano option that costs very little.


I have been using CloudAtCost for almost 2 years. Works fine for side projects or experiments.Also has one time fee option


kimsufi = OVH , just FYI.


Thanks, yes, I actually found them via OVH only, but SO much cheaper than OVH!! The configs offered are much inferior, but okay for my requirements.


They also have their "SoYouStart" brand which sits halfway between their Kimsufi offerings and their normal OVH offerings.

It's also worth checking out online.net - like OVH, they also have a decent range of decently-spec'd-but-cheap servers on offer. Unlike OVH, they only have a single brand, but within that they go all the way from lightweight, ultra-cheap Atom-based servers all the way up to multi-CPU beasts.


The primary difference being that kimsufi has basically no support, you're wholly responsible for whatever OS you're running on the box. The only support is 'wipe and start over'. If you're confident and OK with that it's a lower cost option.


To be honest, that's also the same support level as the higher plans like SoYouStart and OVH. They don't manage or administrate your servers for you. You need knowledge. The good news is: it doesn't take much to be able to manage everything on your own.


So very true and I doubt if ANY service with such low costs would provide any support beyond hardware/network failure. However, speaking for myself, once I have the trusty ol' CentOS 6.7 and an ssh login, Barbara is my aunt, so this works for me. :-)


It's fine as long as one remembers the mantra: backups, backups, backups, backups.


OVH is what we use for our side stuff. Pretty good as long as you never need support. Getting support was very slow.


I use and recommend both OVH and Hetzner.


Is there any way to get the crux of this whole discussion instead of going through each comment?


If you don't mind a sketchy company Volume Drive has great prices, just horrible service.


> sketchy company

Understatement of the year.

For those who are out of the loop, webhostingtalk.com has some great reads. Get some popcorn.


Didn't they just leave 300+ servers at a datacenter?


Hah, they're still in business?

Mine was one of the "stolen" servers from their old colocation provider or whatever whenever drama with them went down ~3 years ago.


I've been quite happy with Delimiter [1]. Cheap, but relatively beefy dedicated servers and S3-compatible object storage. You can use promo code B6NFT66YU7ZN to get 6% off in perpetuity (disclaimer: that's my affiliate code).

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


My experience with Delimiter involved sending them a hard drive, not getting it installed in the "slot hosting" VPS I paid for, not getting any support tickets answered, then eventually getting my drive back three weeks later after complaining on a forum. Said forum then banned a Delimiter sales guy, partly for posting a barcode with my home address and other PI on it.

They are literally the worst hosting business I've ever dealt with, and I've used many of the low-end providers. OVH and online.net are miles better.


When was that? Just curious, because I did see some bad reviews before deciding to go with Delimiter, but also kept hearing that things have improved in recent years. Online.net (specifically their Scaleway brand) I've been happy with as well. Their support has a quick turnaround, but answers have been unrelated to what I've been asking.


That happened in April 2016. Unrelated to my issues, they also had a very long HVAC outage earlier this year. So I'm not sure anything has improved at Delimiter/Yomura.


Something to know about before going with delimiter – https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/4hx9w4/eve_online...


VPSDime (http://vpsdime.com/). Their largest VPS package is

4 CPU

36GB Memory

180GB SSD Space

12TB Traffic Limit

10Gbit Connection

$42.00/mo. Lot of room for multiple sites.


That's both much less storage than he needs and much more expensive.


In the U.S, you can use WholeSaleInternet, Joe's Datacenter and Nocix, those servers are dirt cheap.


Be careful, looks like these may be owned by the same person and are all located in KC MO. The prices look good, but some research should be done. Nocix is/was datashack.

https://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1559810


ovh.com


OpenShift by Red Hat. Upgrade to silver package, they just want your credit card but you don't have to pay anything if you run 3 small gears for an example. If you give them your CC, you get things like own domains etc. for free. For my simple side projects, it's perfect and easy to scale.

I can't remember about storage costs, but you can find out!


Thanks - I will check that out, though I seriously doubt if they would be offering anything like a dedi box with 500GB drive for less than $10/mo...


https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/

If you use exactly 500gb it would be be $15 a month for standard storage.




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