I came here to mention Scaleway ARM servers which cost 3/mo with unlimited bandwidth. With reverse SSH tunneling, there's no need for a dedicated service.
The combined cost for me is enough that it’s cheaper to rent a dedicated octacore xeon with 16G ram, 250G SSD and 1TB HDD and unlimited traffic with a 1Gbps line[1], and run my own services. In fact, I pay less than 50% of what I’d pay for the services, I have far more performance, and can offer these services to 10 people at no cost, and still come in better.
These services might be worth it if you’re in SV, but 10$/mo is something different to a person earning 300k$/year in SV, and to a student earning 8k$/year somewhere else.
Yup, that’s exactly what I’m doing now. Transcoding video, even on the fly (after I had several situations where lag with Twitch was massive, and with nginx-rtmp and nginx-hls it was nil)
IRCCloud (4$) + ngrok (10$) + some free libre email provider (5$) + 1TB cloud storage (10-12$) + ...
The combined cost for me is enough that it’s cheaper to rent a dedicated octacore xeon with 16G ram, 250G SSD and 1TB HDD and unlimited traffic with a 1Gbps line[1], and run my own services. In fact, I pay less than 50% of what I’d pay for the services, I have far more performance, and can offer these services to 10 people at no cost, and still come in better.
These services might be worth it if you’re in SV, but 10$/mo is something different to a person earning 300k$/year in SV, and to a student earning 8k$/year somewhere else.
[1] Server price and performance comparisons between several hosters, previously featured on HN: https://gist.github.com/justjanne/205cc548148829078d4bf2fd39...