I'm building a cyberpunk data center of old and second hand laptops and minicomputers at home.

CC: @aral@mastodon.ar.al

@aral I haven't seen it mentioned before (apologies if my server missed a reply mentioning this), but given what you're working on I thought it might be worth taking a peek at what https://OpenBSD.amsterdam is doing. They're on the Fediverse too, and seem like a good group of people.

(Not affiliated in any way, I'm just aware of them and would love to make use of their service for my own site, someday soon)

@aral It's weird how much these are approaching dedicated server costs.

I rent a server from OVH with 8 cores (16 hyperthreads), 32 GiB of ECC RAM, and 4x2 TB hard disks.

It costs £20.39/month. That's €23.79/month at current exchange rates, or about 20% more than the VPS that you quote.

But the VPS has two cores, only 4 GiB of RAM, and only 80 GB of disk space. The disk is NVMe, so much faster than the spinning rust in my server, but with 32 GiB of RAM I can keep almost half as much in the buffer cache as the NVMe, so read-heavy workloads are going to be about as fast.

The promise of virtualisation-based servers was that they could be much cheaper than dedicated because you could rent just a small fraction of a whole machine.

@aral I don't know what your needs are, but have you considered a homeserver? I run my personal smallweb sites from a Rpi in my closet. Low maintenance, no cost increase and the uptime is over a year now.

@aral digitalocean.com starting at 4$/m for a VM. IDK ethical aspect. Datacenter in Amsterdam

Hey everyone, just wanted to say thank you for all your replies, I think I have enough candidates to look into now :)

So since @hetzner has sadly priced itself outside of Small Web use, the hosts I’ll be looking into include:

⁃ Netcup (Germany)
⁃ HostUp (Sweden) - if owner isn’t far right; waiting for confirmation on that as someone mentioned they might be
⁃ Contabo (Germany)
⁃ Mantu (Germany) - if they have an API. Wasn’t able to find one while skimming heir site.

Ones I’ve already eliminated include:

⁃ IONOS (€10 setup fee on monthly contracts and might be UK based.)
⁃ Any based in the US for obvious reasons.

Thanks again :)

PS. It does suck because I had everything working the Hetzner API but maybe this will make me bite the bullet and create an abstraction layer so we can easily switch between several hosting providers. This was always my plan but I was thinking I’d hold off under after initial release.

#SmallWeb #SmallTech #VPS #hosting #EU

@aral I don't know how they compare cost-wise, but I find Infomaniak a very ethical company, rock-solid reliability, and they use the OpenVPN stack.

@aral

https://www.manitu.de/vserver/

@aral@mastodon.ar.al

Check netcup and or contabo

@aral unbelievable! (actually, totally believable, greedy b------s)

I remember fondly how last year I would spin up VPSs for self-hosting experiments. CPX21 was something like 3 or 4 Euros a month. I don't dare look at the current price.

Avari!

@aral I use contabo for my personal stuff, they are pretty cheap

https://contabo.com/en-us/

@aral I can't yet recommend them, but I'm currently testing HostUp: https://hostup.se/

@aral Icelandic 1984.is offers selfhosted VPS with 1 GB RAM, 1 CPU, 25 GB DISK, 1 TB TX/RX for €8.72, don’t know if that meets your requirements. Next tier up is about €18. Seems like an ethical company, I use their free DNS services. https://1984.hosting/product/pricelist/

@aral I moved from hetzner to OVH because of the price increase

@aral I've used a VPS hosted by IONIS previously. Reliability was good. However, I looked recently and their prices have gone up significantly since I last used them. It looks like there's no longer a small option - starts at medium now (there may be a hidden web page where you can still find small spec option).

@aral I have been using Linode for years. It has been bought by Akamai though. Still has the $5 plan which I'm using.

There is LowEndBox which has various listings of providers: https://lowendbox.com/

@aral I always thought seti at home would lead to a distributed-pc-powered alternative internet.

Wouldn't that have been a nice future?

@aral I'm using their cheapest tier (ARM), this past weekend they added (or released) some capacity... I don't know if it's gone again, though.

But, overall... yes, there is pretty worrying costs crisis, and they started to focus on AI too, as "everyone" else.

@aral The best method what I do now is to buy refurbished thin clients and desktops. Thanks to IPv6 and fiber to the home, I can run a lot of stuff at home.
But the budget VPS becoming more expensive does pose a problem.

@aral Unsure if Scaleway or UpCloud have also increased their prices (I'm in Australia so EU is normally too much latency for me to consider)

You could also play the LowEndBox lottery.