nTh among all

The VPS market is really really interesting to watch. Maybe it’s just me, but the idea of being able to get a year of a decent system for the price of a pizza is fascinating – and somewhat dangerous to my wallet. At my peak, I had 4 VPSes running at the same time – and each of them doing practically nothing. So I ran TF2 servers off the ones that could support it until the prepaid year was over.

It’s just so… attractive. My ‘own’ servers, without the expense of needing to buy and pizza boxes that sound like hurricanes and are apparently good places for cat puke. And now I find myself needing to get one to power everything in the near future because I’ve been unsatisfied with Dreamhost for about 2 years, and they finally pushed me over recently. So I decided to take notes with the target of migrating to having everything of mine on a VPS in December.

My usecase can be summed up simply as a always-on low traffic webserver, hosting a personal blog (WordPress., while I look at Ghost), MySQL database and Jenkins build server (them Lightroom plugins!). Somewhat price-sensitive – I’m not made of money, but at the same time I’m not going to sweat the price of a coffee at Starbucks. Bonus points for extra space for hosting friends’ sites though. They can pay me back by buying me a drink or something.

Cloud Hosting

Cloud hosting is hard to quantify – off-hand, the big three are Amazon, Google And Azure. But I’m going to expand my definition to cloud = anything that’s on demand, per-usage charges. Which opens it up.

The big 3 are pretty much unsuitable. Amazon’s still aiming toward companies that need to spin up and down instances – and quickly prices themselves out looking at the alternatives. Even looking at the price of the heavy use reserved instances, that’s $51+ hourly fees/year for the smallest system (t2.micro with 1GB of RAM & a throttled CPU). But wait, that’s actually $4.25 + $2.16 = $6.41 per month (assuming the current $0.003/hour charge stays the same) which isn’t so bad.

Except I had a wonderful manager in the past who pointed out that it’s not the cost of the compute power that was the killer when it came to building a company on EC2, it’s the cost of the outbound bandwidth. Data out is still an extra fee. Oh, and disk space is charged per GB as well. The wonders of all those options!

Google Compute Engine and Microsoft Azure are pretty much the same. Google wants $6.05 for their lowest system (0.6GB of RAM & 1 “Virtual Core”, likely aka throttled CPU much like Amazon); Microsoft just states an estimated monthly price of $13/month for a A0 instance, for 1 core and 0.75GB of RAM. Here’s a nice difference though: It comes with 20GB of disk.

So the big 3 are out for me (I write, being able to look back after looking in other places). Let’s look at other providers, shall we?

Cloudy VPSes

So named because they are charge-per-use VPSes, but all the ancillary stuff is in the price like traditional VPSes.

I haven’t done a really extensive search for these type of providers. The biggest known one is DigitalOcean, and I found Vultr on Twitter. And then I found Atlantic.Net somewhere else. (I think a Hacker News thread on DigitalOcean, amusingly.)

The biggest thing for me recently was the sudden addition of Atlantic.net‘s lowest end system (www.atlantic.net/vps/vps-hosting/) – $0.99/month for 256MB of RAM, 10GB of disk and 1TB of transfer is pretty much unheard of. Making the ultra low price point generally available is entirely new, and it’s going to be interesting to see if anyone in the cloudy space matches it – it’s actually cheaper than traditional VPS providers for a small always on box. It’s definitely on my list to watch (and possibly get for things like a target for automatic MySQL backups).

DigitalOcean would have my vote right off the bat for that sweet sweet $100 in credit they’re giving to students (www.digitalocean.com/company/blog/were-participating-in-githubs-student-developer-program/), except for the fact it’s for new users only. Which is rather annoying.

All 3 providers appear to be about the same:

• Vultr appears to be trying to undercut DigitalOcean in the low end – More RAM/less space/same price for the cheapest box, same RAM/less space/cheaper for the next level up.
• Atlantic.Net also appears to trying to undercut DigitalOcean, just with more space and bandwidth instead of RAM. And literally cents cheaper! ($4.97 vs $5? Mhmm…)
• Meanwhile, DigitalOcean coasts along on brand recognition and testimonials of friends.

So cloudy VPSes are far better for the single always-on server usecase. How about traditional VPSes?

 Traditional VPSes

Tradiational VPSes and I have an interesting history. Prior to finding LowEndBox, VPSes were super expensive compared to shared hosting, eg www.1and1.com/vps-hosting – I still have a client/friend hanging onto his $50/month 1and1 VPS that I cringe about.

That pretty much changed when I found LowEndBox. For the ultralow low pricepoint (like Atlantic.Net), LowEndBox has had $10/year offers in the past, primarily for systems with less RAM (but 256MB has happened – lowendbox.com/blog/crissic-solutions-10year-256mb-openvz-vps-and-more-in-jacksonville-florida/)

Downside of traditional VPSes are that the better prices == prepay annually. No pay-as-you-go here.

My history:

• Virpus.com for 2 Xen VPSes in 2012 – I think they are one of the few who are doing Xen as opposed to OpenVZ or even KVM
• Hostigation in 2013 – for a personal project that never actually happened
• WeLoveServers in September 2013 – basic server for $19/year
• Crissic in early 2014 – Ostensibly better than WLS for $2/month that I hosted a client site on

Looking at the Virpus site, they’ve dropped their prices from $10/month to $5/month. I can’t remember what I paid for Hostigation, but I rarely even logged into that VPS.

WLS was at the very least decent. I used it mainly as an OpenVPN endpoint more than anything.

Crissic is good, but overly touchy on limits. I regularly get my SSH connection closed despite keepalives being set, and I can’t figure out why.

Overselling is a thing that happens though – CPU usage in particular is really limited, and suspensions happen. So I’m leery of moving my stuff to a traditional VPS provider without being able to test it. Especially if I just paid for a year of hosting.

New to me: RAM heavy VPSes

VPSDime (https://vpsdime.com/index.php) is a new-to-me provider. 6GB of RAM for $7 a month. Unfortunately, offset by only 30GB of storage and 2TB of bandwidth vs WeLoveServers’ 6GB/80GB/10TB for $19/month. Then again, I don’t really use that much storage or bandwidth.

Bonus: Storage VPSes!

The main reason I kept DreamHost for 2 years after I got annoyed with them was that their AUP allowed me to use RAW images on my photography site, and finding space for 500GB of photos was not cheap anywhere else. With the introduction of their new DreamObjects service (read: S3 clone), that changed, and my last reason for keeping them disappeared.

VPSDime has interesting storage VPS offers. 500GB of disk for $7 is $2 more than Amazon Glacier (not accounting for the fact that I’m unlikely to get to use all 500GB), but offset that against the fact that it’s online (no retrieval times) and I don’t have to pay retrieval fees. Maybe I’ll get to ditch one of my external drives…

Runner up: BuyVM – more established, but about double the price for the same amount of space 🙁

TL;DR

I’m inclined to see what Vultr’s 1GB/$7 month plan is like to host my personal stuff. Also thinking of getting a 1GB WLS VPS to be an OpenVPN endpoint/development server. Possibly Atlantic.Net‘s cheapest service instead, but an extra 58 cents per month isn’t going to break the bank and I have the advantage of not needing to give Atlantic.Net my credit card details. In the worst case I can walk away from WLS without worrying about my credit card being charged.

Yay for backups and Ansible making it possible to deploy a new server in minutes once I get the environment setup just right.