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Canadian VPS providers?
I'm currently using AWS to run a couple of t4g.nano instances for a few little services but I'm wondering if there's a good hosting service in Canada, owned by Canadians, etc.
Basically I don't really like handing money over to daddy bezos and due to current political tensions I'd rather not support US companies, but I have NO IDEA how to find a reputable VPS provider.
It isn't Canadian but it isn't US based either as it is based from Germany. Hetzner has decently priced and fairly solid VPS offerings where you can choose from it being hosted in either Germany, Finland, Singapore or the US. Of course, if you want proximity for latency it would still be hosted in the US, so that might still be a dealbreaker to you.
Hetzner is mentioned often in discussions like this, but a dealbreaker for me was that I had to send a copy of my passport or other ID when registering an account. There are probably good reasons to do that, or maybe there are rules that force them to do it, but I still don't like it.
Eventually, I took this as a trigger to start learning OpenBSD and I got a VM at OpenBSD Amsterdam. It has been... a humbling experience so far. But one that I haven't regretted yet.
As far as my understanding goes it has to do with fraud prevention and might even be required by German law as I think I have seen other German companies having similar requirements. I can see it being a dealbreaker to some degree.
Is that still true? I just registered and I didn’t have to do that. But maybe they had my name on file because I had a previous account. I’ve been using hetzner for over 2 years and I am very happy with it
I had no prior experience with Hetzner. I tried to sign up a couple of weeks ago, and was asked to provide ID. A quick search on the internet shows that the experiences are mixed. So are asked, others are not. I am in an EU country, though, not sure what would set off the fraud detection alarm bells.
That’s crazy. Maybe they had some cookies saved on me, because I am in Thailand and didn’t have to verify my ID. But I did have to pay 20 bucks in advance
That's funny. I'm from Mexico and I had to verify my ID, but didn't pay anything in advance.
Came to make a similar suggestion! I’ve used Hetzner briefly with no problems, and had notably good experiences with Scaleway (French, with Paris / Amsterdam / Warsaw regions available) who I’ve used slightly more extensively.
I have heard of Scaleway before, but I never looked too closely at their offerings. They have a line of VPS that cost 0.10€ per month! They have very low resource limits, but who cares at 10 cents a month! I am going to try and get some of those (they have limited availability). There has to be a catch somewhere, right?
Edit: The block storage is not included in that price. So it’s 0.11€ for the VM, 0.80€ for the storage, and 2.40€ or so for an ipv4 if needed. There is an account quota of 1 instance per datacenter, and that instance is only available in 3 datacenters. So a total limit of 3 instances per account. Despite all that, fantastic deal.
I want to set mine up as an immutable OS to host docker images. I am going to play with installing Tailscale on top of flatcar Linux. But I may just cut my losses and go with Debian server with auto updates enabled.
If you need an ipv4 address (which you probably do)
Which is about €2.88 per month.
Are you sure? I am looking at the website and that seems to be the hourly pricing?
Here is the pricing page. The estimated monthly cost for the learning instance is 0.10€/month. I made an account and didn’t see any at that price, but I was just looking on my phone quickly.
Back before switching to static-sites + github/render.com for blog hosting, I used to hunt around on https://lowendbox.com/tag/canada/ for VPS providers running decent deals. The forum is also pretty useful for reviews once you find a provider.
Giving the Canada page a once-over, there aren't any live deals but it does list a couple CA-based providers:
https://accurishosting.ca/vps
https://servarica.com/all-offers/
Good luck!
Even if some of the deals don't appear to be "live," it's worth clicking through to see if special sale links are still active.
Not Canada based, but I scooped up a "Black Friday 2023" deal with one a couple months ago. Some of these providers just want to sell VPSs and don't care.
Those both look pretty good. Is servarica suspiciously cheap for a ton of RAM and storage though?
I'll admit that I didn't do any deep checks aside from "do they have their headquarters in a Canadian address".
Looking at accuris, things seem a big suspect. They stopped payment for their lease in a Ottawa data center which left VPS and colocated hardware installs in limbo. https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/198221/accuris-hosting-ottawa-location-down-since-september-25
The other one seems fine from what I can tell in "low end talk" forum threads - https://duckduckgo.com/?q=servarica+site%3Alowendtalk.com&t=ffab&df=y&ia=web
But in any case, I'd go with the other options offered in this thread. Anecdotal experiences from Tildes users is worth more than the rabble on LET.
Thanks for the follow up.
I did end up going with servarica just due to cost vs lots of ram/cpu/storage. The first thing I'm moving over is my syncthing hub so a bit of extra storage is nice but I will have other devices connected (obviously) so if it also goes down due to unpaid bills then I'll deal with it.
The only thing that got me was a dumb configuration setting. They have some boxes you can check like "enable fail2ban" and "disable ssh password"... well "disable ssh password" doesn't actually disable it because ubuntu server by default includes that file in /etc/ssh/sshd_config.d that enables it. I did send support an email about that and hopefully they fix that.
I think @forked_bytes was the only one who commented that had personal experience with a provider that's actually Canadian/in Canada. I'm starting to think I should have gone with their suggestion though.
I've been happy with LunaNode, located in Toronto. Price and performance are good, usage based pay as you go billing. I think there's a free trial. The interface is a bit old school but functional.
I came across this recently: https://lukecyca.com/2025/canadian-vps-review.html
That author also mentions https://freerangecloud.com/ elsewhere.
I used Whatbox a good number of years ago, and their service is quite good. Probably overkill for what you're looking for though, as they have clients that prioritize fast upload speeds and large storage capacity. But, one of their small slices may be powerful enough to multiplex the apps you're running in different instances now, or you may be able to ask them about smaller spaces than their general offerings.