[throwaway290232]

There are also a bunch of OpenStack Public Cloud providers in Europe and around the world: https://www.openstack.org/marketplace/public-clouds/ Some are not listed there so you may have to do some research (I know there's one in Chicago)

These "Cloud" systems provide a number of advantages over VPS providers. They have a standard programmable interface and command-line tools, they provide many services you may or may not get with a given VPS provider (programmable networks, load balancers, object and block storage, secrets management, configurable user/role access controls, etc). They also of course allow you to scale your resources programmatically and may provide pay-as-you-go pricing. And if it's something you're into, you can typically find a Terraform provider that works with it.

Slightly more expensive than a simple VPS, but the automation, failure recovery, and security gains can be significant.

[KronisLV]

Thanks for dropping that link, it feels like there's definitely a niche that OpenStack can fill in nicely!

I guess the only other alternative is to look for the lowest common denominator, which in the case of Linux servers is typically something like Ansible/Salt - to connect to VPSes through SSH and do all of the necessary configuration from bottom up in an automated and repeatable manner.

Of course, that's not to say that it's always easy and i applaud what OpenStack is trying to do with providing APIs for a lot of that stuff.

[throwaway290232]

Yeah, they sort of have different purposes. VPS providers are the easiest way to just start using some VMs for static workloads. But Cloud providers give you not only a ton more control, but also allow you to save money by only getting charged for the resources you use. The tradeoffs being that the latter is way more complicated, and the "hyper-scale" Cloud providers are extremely overpriced. I'm hoping more small providers pop up and make the big girls more competitively priced.