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When did VPS hosting get so expensive?
I recently looked around at VPS pricing on DigitialOcean, Linode and Vultr. Everything seems much higher than I'd expect - way over the inflation rate. It looks like a 2 core 8GB VPS is being priced between $45 and $60 per month. Maybe I don't remember correctly but I recall being able to get 2 core VMs around $20 a few years ago!
When the interest rate went from <1% to 5% over a year. Many webhosts were running at cost or at a loss, and now that money isn't cheap anymore, they're tightening their prices to be net positive.
Those 3 have already gone up plucky upstarts to mature market players by now. If you want bottom of the barrel pricing, it's best to look at new upstarts. OCI and Hetzner (which isn't new but the US expansion is) will get you better prices. On Hetzner, it looks like you can get a 4 vCPU, 8 gb x86 VPS for 12 euros a month. OCI's ARM offerings should be competitive but their pricing page is harder to decipher than linear A. They also have a free tier, which is unique.
Assuming I'm right that "OCI" is Oracle Cloud, I've had great luck with their free tier. They'll give you two tiny x86 instances and then an ARM instance with 4c and 24GB of RAM (configurable from 4x 1c/4GB to 1x 4c 24GB) for free, forever. I was always annoyed before trying to run game servers (e.g. Minecraft) for friends cheaply on other providers, so 24GB of RAM for free was huge.
Sadly it's so busy on OCI now that they're out of capacity for ARM (US East). TBH that RAM is too high...its easier to overprovision CPU than RAM.
Wait until the free trial is over, and convert your account to a paid account. Then you can get an ampere instance for free. It won’t be marked “always free” but it will still be free if you stay under the limits.
Oh, I didn't know that. That's too bad! I've had mine running in US West for years, but I just deleted it recently since I wasn't using it. Here's hoping I can remake it when I need to...
It turns out a lot of business models that "flourished" over the last decade stopped being viable once they started having to pay actual interest on their debt.
You can find much cheaper VPS if you are willing to go with smaller companies and pre-pay for a year at a time.
https://lowendtalk.com/categories/offers
LowEndTalk has a section for current offers. RackNerd has specials on holidays - this most recent Easter sale looks to still be good. They have a 5GB KVM VPS with 100GB SSD for $58.88 per year.
https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/185231/easter-deals-new-inventory-new-deals-excellent-pricing-fantastic-support
Small hosting companies have had a couple of difficult years, notably due to:
The hyper-scalers (AWS/GCP/Azure) have normalized huge prices for compute, so many providers just follow suit because they can. There are still some cheaper alternatives, but you'll have to do a lot of due diligence on reliability and support quality.
I recommend checking out Hetzner: their historical bread-and-butter has been dedicated server, but their VPS offering is really strong. I have been a customer for 4 years now and can recall a single short network incident. You can try them out with 20$ of free credits by using this referral code: https://hetzner.cloud/?ref=nxIZ2jnL5MpT
Holy, 45-60$ is definitely something.
OVH for example has still reasonable prices, but still - expensive considering the low space.
25€
4 vCore
8 GB RAM
160 GB SSD NVMe
For 60$ I would rather get a proper root server instead.
At contabo (a German hoster) I pay 17€ for
8 vCore
30 GB RAM
200 GB NVMe or 800 GB SSD
Granted, Contabo VPS are sometimes a bit slowly but the storage makes it up for it.
I have a minecraft/CS/Satisfactory/Valheim server running in parallel. Only the Minecraft server sometimes seem to run sluggish at times.
But this also happens if it runs alone. It seems to require more juice, but we don't play it often anyway.
Ah, I forgot about good old OVH. Thanks for the reminder! Looks like they still have some good options.
If you are open for paying a bit more, but want to have better performance, a dedicated server might really be a better option.
Hetzner for example wants 50€ (55$?) for:
AMD Ryzen™ 5 3600CPU
6 cores / 12 threads @ 3.6 GHz
64 GB DDR4 RAM
1 x 512 GB NVMe SSD
That's much more than I personally would need. :)
If you have a good internet connection at home, this setup could be built from used parts as well rather cheaply.
Yeah I'd go for a dedicated machine at these prices.
I do have a good home internet connection - but for any public service would really prefer to host it outside of my home network.
Looks like Hetzner has nothing dedicated in North America.
So it looks like OVH wants to charge me $120/month for a decent dedicated game server as a US citizen. When I try to sign up normally it has a $60/month with no setup fee deal - but then won't allow for me to register with "United States" as my country. When I register before purchase I can complete the sign up but then they ask for $120/month + a $96 setup fee. WTF?
Man this sucks. Maybe try Hetzner instead. Not sure if they behave similar though. 96$ setup fee, lol. Do they tell you what exactly costs 100$ to set up?
The dedicated server at Hetzner has no setup fee. Maybe worth to look into.
2 CPU 8 GB ram is a sort of special configuration. 2 CPU 4GB RAM can still be had for $20/month on Vultr. But it's also important to understand that all of these providers have become bigger more well-known providers that have increased uptime reliability/resiliency over the years. They're no longer just geared toward experimental/hobby services.
You can still find some of the lower-end or new providers, though. Low End Box is where I found my last VPS provider (HostUS, though I don't recommend them anymore). Looking here I was able to find a 2CPU 8GB RAM for $4/month. I would expect massive oversubscription at that price, but it might be good enough for hobby work.
Personally, I got rid of my VPS after HostUS made some changes that severely negatively impacted my usage. I moved a couple of things onto a jail on my NAS, and some public-facing services into Google Cloud's App Engine (within their free tier). Serverless for seldom-used services can save a ton of money.
I worked for web hosts and cloud providers for a few years.
Honestly, this is why I colo. $80 a month and I have a 36 core 72 thread, 512GB RAM behemoth running proxmox that I don’t have to share with anyone.
I don’t think it’s practical for everyone, obviously. But with the pricing and the gimmicks VPS providers use and knowing the margin, I prefer to self host with colocation for a little more.
About the only “big” name I’ve been consistently happy with is hetzner. But only with the caveat that you can support yourself. They don’t have the most responsive support.
Cool! A few questions if you don’t mind:
Did you buy a traditional server? I feel like Dell and HP charge like $5000 for servers with those specs. I know you can get used, several year old machines without warranties for far less. Or did you build your own?
Do you keep any spare components around? I know I’d worry that any hardware failure would become my immediate responsibility to travel back over and fix
Sure thing!
It is a newer BL460C blade server. Price was $475. So there’s a little bit of a discount there as I’m slotted in with a few other people and there’s a little bit higher risk since they can’t operate without an enclosure. I believe this is a 4 server enclosure. But it doesn’t bother me.
As far as replacement parts, my provider usually keeps some in stock and will swap out for a price and the only major failures I’ve ever had are hard drives. I’ve had a power edge 630 and 730 colo’d with this company as well. Both of which are at my place of employment now enjoying their retirement.
I should mention I lucked out a little on providers and mine is very small. One owner with a few support staff who is very honest and readily available on discord. Kind of has a family vibe. Definitely not typical.
So, you mean, you've found a holy grail-like provider! :-)
I pay about 60/month at nfoservers for 6 cores/6gb/600gb disk. Based on the comments here that seems a tad high but we've been with them forever and our community runs on donations so the cost is shared.