[IgorPartola]

For those interested in this kind of thing, there are two fun resources I would recommend. First, LowEndBox (https://lowendbox.com/) which documents where you can get VPS hosting for as little as $1/month or even cheaper in some instances. Second, Super Dimensional Fortress (http://sdf.org/) where for a $1 you can get lifetime low level hosting and for $25 you can get access to a much beefier server. A community of old school *nix nerds comes as a bonus.

[dannyw]

Just watch out: lots of the low end box providers end up shutting down, and may take your servers and data with it.

I now stick to reputable “value” providers like BuyVM. Having an operator I can discord and get frank answers, as well as a commitment to privacy (Tor exit nodes welcomed), is nice.

[EricE]

>and may take your servers and data with it.

Only if you let them.

Do people seriously NOT perform backups via independent methods utterly independent of their primary cloud service provider?

No one remembers Photobucket or the hundreds of other cloud services that went "poof" into the night?

There is no cloud, just someone else's computer - always have backups of some other means. A different provider with a different account, alternate mechanisms (i.e. email addresses with different email providers, etc.) to get to that data and accounts...

It's even easier now with VM's, snapshots, free open source backup software that understands all of that - fairly inexpensive commercial solutions like veem - there is zero excuse.

My favorite was a small SAAS provider that had all their backup infrastructure on AWS under the same account as the test/dev and operations - and someone got in and deleted it all. Partitioning - yes, it's an essential thing. And not just for technical. Separation of duties. Requiring concurrence by more than one person for critical operations. Lessons that should have been learned from past experience.

Peoples (especially developers) eyes glaze over with documents like NIST 800-53 - but all those controls exist from experience. The bigger/more critical your system is to your survival, the more of those controls you should have answers for!

[renewiltord]

Honestly, they generally don't go poof. I remember I had a VPS for more than 10 years with Hetzner. No poofing till they had to get rid of that offering. I have the backups but I think now I prefer just running on GKE + RDS for funsies. Costs a bunch (like $50/mo) but I don't have to worry about anything.

And fuck me if I'm ever writing a BIND zonefile ever again.

[qeternity]

> GKE + RDS

Uh what? Really?

This doubles your failure surface.

[renewiltord]

True, but I only need two nines. It's my personal stuff.

[klodolph]

This is one of the reasons why business negotiation books will remind you that when you’re making a deal with a vendor, you want to make a deal that is profitable for the vendor and supports / sustains their business. If you don’t, then you’ll have to find a new vendor after they collapse (or get rid of you as a client).

For personal hosting I think one of the problems that makes this more complicated is that even as a group, you’re nobody’s biggest customer. You’re just a side business for someone selling hosting B2B, usually. I know that the local grocery store will make sure that they can still sell to local customers, because that’s the core of their business; I’m not so sure that cloud providers care much about my dinky website.

[tacon]

lowendbox.com was great to start, but they got popular, and then profitable, and finally were bought by a low end hosting aggregator/rollup, and now almost all the different offers on lowendbox.com are coming from essentially the same company. The sister site, lowendtalk.com, seems to have picked up the mantle of open discussions, and they have offers, too. For example, recently I bought a 1GB KVM VPS for $14.83/yr. With KVM, I can use netboot.xyz and play to my hearts content with any Linux distro I want. I have NixOS running on it at the moment. On another, I'm playing with dokku, which takes over the whole VPS as a heroku clone.

These companies are often unstable, so regular backups of anything you might be sad losing are vital. I recommend paying by the month, if that is available, and using this whitelist of low end providers who have been in business for a reasonable length of time[0].

[0] https://lowendboxes.review/the-whitelist/

[jart]

I'm so glad Super Dimensional Fortress is still around. I learned how to use Unix thanks to them back in the 1990s. They're in a different league than the goofballs selling unlimited web hosting cheaper than arizona iced tea.

[zepatrik]

Just had a good 2h read on internet history.

[TedDoesntTalk]

This. sdf.org is awesome.

[cromka]

And their VPN service is a steal!

[boarnoah]

Definitely be careful with hosts off Lowendbox, as other commenters have mentioned providers go offline without warning all the time. Never pay more than a year in advance etc...

Notorious for "Deadpooling", providers sell ultra cheap hosts. Run them on over-provisioned servers for a year or two and disappear overnight.

ex: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/12/08/1549222/20-low-end-...

[lupire]

Also nearlyfreespeech.net is old and cheap and doesn't police legal content.

[jodrellblank]

> "doesn't police legal content."

What does that mean - what would it mean to "police legal content"?

[SkyBelow]

I think the claim is that anything clearly legal is allowed. The problem is how iffy 'clearly' legal is. First, which country's law are we using? Second, which court rulings are we applying? Anything controversial ceases to be clearly legal because the police can go after it. Even if a well funded defense will eventually win the case, it may be on appeals meaning that punishment for the content has already begun. Thus it becomes easy to justify anything controversial as not being fully legal.

And that's assuming they'll actually try to stick to their claim. I find that isn't the case when it is really put to the test.

[jodrellblank]

I get it, I was reading "police" too literally; police enforce the law, so how can you have only legal content and describe that as "not policing"? And if you have only legal content, of course you don't police it because that's redundant. "We don't filter the filtered water" you must because that's how you get filtered water, but you don't because you already have done so and it doesn't need doing again.

Un-moderated, or "we have no content policy or acceptable use policy separate from the law".

[retrac]

From the context, I assume they mean kick you off the service for publishing something the hoster disagrees with.

[newen]

Topical example is Parler getting shut down by AWS for whatever reason Amazon gave.

[seneca]

Knowingly breaking guidelines here, with apologies, but why in the world is this downvoted? It's an accurate and timely example.

[jfengel]

Saying "whatever reason Amazon gave" is a pretty good reason to downvote it. Amazon gave reasons. If you can cite them, then you can disagree with them. But to simply wave those reasons away as "whatever" is intended to convey "that was obviously legal content being shut down for purely ideological reasons", and that is simply not the case.

The "reason Amazon gave" was "content that threatens the public safety, such as by inciting and planning the rape, torture, and assassination of named public officials and private citizens", with examples given in:

https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.294664...

So it's a bad example of something being dismissed for ideological reasons, and a bad example of something whose reasons can be assumed when the answer was easily available.

That's an excellent reason to downvote something. It's simply not accurate.

[clarge1120]

“whatever reason Amazon gave” was dismissive, but also accurate. They gave a reason. The poster dismissed it and the comment was downvoted for the dismissal.

Each action was ideological.

[jimmydorry]

Assuming the best from the GP, I think they might have meant "whatever" in the sense that AWS enforced their terms of service by enforcing something that they don't hold their other customers to. As you said, this could be for ideological or PR reasons.

The "whatever" being any cause they could justify their actions with.

[mobilio]

It's better to get something even free like AwardSpace (https://www.awardspace.com)

[jcun4128]

> SDF

cool name (know the show)

I'll have to check these out I've been using OVH all this time, also GitHub pages is pretty cool.