Have used them for a long time (I had their 2EUR VPS for ages, let go of it a few months ago but they honoured the price even when they were charging 4EUR for that spec). Very good customer support. I am a little worried about future prices though with electricity costs in Germany (although they have VPS in the US and Finland).
Contabo and Netcup are alternatives. Contabo has options in the UK/US/Singapore but is also German. Netcup is German, and I don't know where their servers are. OVH is another one but have had mixed experiences with their customer support.
I was affected by that fire (lost a VPS), but everything was up again a few hours later. All I had to do was to order a new VPS and restore my (very regular) backups.
The key is to be ready to recover from failure. OVH had a fire, but disks, backups, network, power, etc, can (and do) fail on premium providers. While this may say something about OVH, the effect on you as a customer is essentially the same: downtime, data loss, etc.
My experience with OVH until that point was good. 4 years without problems. I had another VPS and one dedicated server - different datacenters to avoid the "all eggs in the same basket" problem - and they were fine. The dedi, for example, I kept it from early 2017 until 6 months ago when I moved to Hetzner (better hardware, same price) and never had any issues.
I understand that not everyone can or wants to do things this way, but sometimes the savings are huge and that allows you to have more redundancy or to save money. For example, one of my websites uses a bit of bandwidth... last time I checked, it would cost around 2k/mo to run it on AWS, but only ~90 euros/mo on OVH/Hetzner. I can have another 2 replicas/servers ready to go in case of a problem and still save money.
And it's not only servers. For example, I was using S3 to store backups. Now I backup to providers like Backblaze B2, Wasabi, etc, at the same time and still save money. When I had to restore the VPS lost in the fire, I did it from my Wasabi backups because they don't charge for egress (fair use). Overall I still pay less, have more copies in different datacenters and providers, and don't have to worry about the costs of restoring backups (at least not as much).
I've been using both DigitalOcean (~5years) and Hetzner (11months) and I can definitely suggest Hetzner, very good service and good pricing - plus they offer dedicated servers at very reasonable pricing (and even vSwitch! You can create private network between them - very useful when you need a beast server and another one not too powerful).
I'm using Oracle Cloud always free tier, and I've got 4x VMs each with 1 Arm CPU, 6gb memory and 50gb disk. Free forever. You get a small amount of object storage and some free database (nosql/sql) but I'm mainly here for the 4 VMs to run a completely free k0s Kubernetes cluster.
I switched out of digital ocean because their docker apps don’t allow persistent access to the disk and don’t allow you to add any disk.
This eliminated a whole bunch of apps. I real head scratcher.
Render.com works a lot better for me. The disk is symlinked in automatically to ‘/var/data’ and I can add it in with an environmental variable set in the dashboard.
I have no idea why digital ocean cripples its app offerings like this. If anyone works there see this please add disks to docker apps.
The servers (I just tried booting the second-cheapest one) do seem much faster than DigitalOcean's and in my case they're actually cheaper, even without the coming price increase. However, one thing I noticed is that you have to pay extra for a floating IP (€3 + VAT) which is AFAIK free with DigitalOcean—or at least I didn't notice in on my bill. Something to keep in mind. I will probably switch over anyway.
Just switched everything over. I can live without the floating IP for now. I now pay slightly less than what I did at DigitalOcean while doubling the specs. Thanks for the tip!
The only problem is that now those other comments made me consider Contabo...
It doesn't take into account though:
- update guarantees
- quality of customer support (I had very bad experiences with Scaleway for example)
- score normalisation across many instances, to compensate different loads on VM hosts into account
At my company we used Contabo servers. They were Windows VMs, I can’t tell anything about Linux ones. But, the ones we had felt underpowered for what we expected. It might have been subjective, we haven’t performed any benchmarking, just a feeling. Also, their UI is straight from the 90s, in a bad way.
Interesting. Looks like more than half price. Are their interface / setup as easy as DO droplets? What's the catch? Are DO just expensive because they are market leaders?
They have developed drivers for Kubernetes though (CSI, CCM and Cluster Autoscaler). There are some good projects on GitHub to set it up with Terraform. I guess a real managed service will come at some point.
I tried to create an account and got the following error message:
Invalid characters, allowed are: A-Z a-z 0-9 ä ö ü ß Ä Ö Ü ^ ! $ % / ( ) = ? + # - . , ; : ~ * @ [ ] { } _ ° §
What year is it, that we cannot use &?
I recommend it as well, and one added benefit is you're in the same network as their cheap "storage box" servers (AKA SMB/CIFS/WebDAV/SSH storage server), so you can connect the two and get faster block storage compared to combining two clouds.
I have been using Backblaze/Wasabi. If you get their European servers, you can rclone mount on a Hetzner VPS and get very good speeds. If you have a fiber connection/very fast disks at home then maybe it will bottleneck. But for file storage and basic playback (for example, through SMB mount) then it is pretty good.
Tbf though, Hetzner auctions with 6TB*2 of disk at 45EUR are a good alternative. It is really a trade-off between having a server with decent power or having the flexibility of scalable S3 storage.
I wanted to build something Plex-like so sadly real block storage was a requirement, otherwise indexing and seeking could be a pain. If not I would use Wasabi or other S3-likes
Ah, I use it for Jellyfin. The only issue that I have found was storing the config files on a remote system. I have actually had that problem locally too (when using a HDD mount on a HyperV VM). But storing the config locally seemed to help.
I don't do transcodes though, and I think that is the other problem with a low-power system.
I preferred them to DO as they had newer (AMD CPU) hardware but then had a very bad experience with them as a customer, causing me to move my business away back to DO.
Contabo and Netcup are alternatives. Contabo has options in the UK/US/Singapore but is also German. Netcup is German, and I don't know where their servers are. OVH is another one but have had mixed experiences with their customer support.
DO prices are ridiculous (imo).