Out of curiosity, what advantages do the small VPS hosts offer compared to the big 3 (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud)? Customer Service? Pricing? Local Data Center?
Until recently I had a 4gb ram 80gb ssd+2tb hd VPS running debian in a Montreal data centre with a real use 700 mbit pipe to my city with a budget provider for the equivalent of $80USD/year. When fio speeds were slow they moved me to a less crowded server. I gave it up as don't need it and moved my personal sites back to NFS for peanuts a year and services to my NAS. The pricing, offsite storage for my backups, Canadian sovereignty, lack of perceived complexity with a big provider was all attractive. I'm a physician with a tech hobby and last serious tech work was in the LAMP days with perl and php. Trying to think of learning about AWS and screwing up usage based billing was daunting!
A few months ago I was going through my secondary email and noticed I was getting a $0.01 monthly bill from AWS.
Having not used AWS for years, I logged in to check it out, navigated through the Kafkaesque maze of their services until I found what I was looking for:
A lone S3 storage bucket, with one file, "Squirrel.jpg". A 200kB picture of a squirrel that I uploaded 8 years ago and can't remember why.
I wonder what the cost to AWS was for keeping track of that and running your CC. There's no way they made money off you / that 12 cents/year cost them *at least* 12 cents to collect every year
That's funny. I kept getting a -$100 bill from a credit card for a few months after closing it. Eventually called them and suggested they can send me a cheque instead of a bill next time for similar reasons...
IIRC the CC they had on hand had long expired and they never actually managed to charge me for these minuscule amounts, which is why I didn't notice it for so long.
> Trying to think of learning about AWS and screwing up usage based billing was daunting!
One of the hard rules we learned pre-pandemic was that services attached to usage based billing should really exit on error. It's a lesson I'm keeping in mind working with agents and routing (and the main reason I'm local-first).
Canadian here, could you share the name of the provider? I'd love to move to something more local and just need a basic small vps for a simple apache host. I know of a couple providers but never talked to anyone actually using one.
Last year, I moved from DigitalOcean to FullHost (their Vancouver datacentre) for hosting a small SaaS and a bunch of personal projects. It's cheaper and FAR better performance.
It was ServaRICA as someone else suggested. It was a Black Friday hybrid VPS deal from a few years ago, looks like they still have comparable stuff on their site. For the cost I would generally assume anything important needs to be duplicated in case the company folds or a fire unless you pay them for such a service. (I don't have any vested interest in suggesting them.)
Thanks! Nothing important, personal site with the source stored in a git repo replicated to a few places, so them folding would just be a minor inconvenience.
Much better prices, and simplicity. The power you get from Hetzner or Kimsufi is crazy compared to AWS.
If I need to host something small, I don’t want to mess around with the many permissions and quirks that are required to deal with AWS. It is often much easier to just setup the server on a standalone service.
When I worked at Microsoft, I seldom used Azure for personal use due to it being expensive and complicated.
Whereas I have plenty of Fourplex.net servers because even on half the salary, it's affordable enough for 16 Tor exit relays and two personal web/email/Mastodon servers.
Most of my customers (small VPS host here) don't like the companies behind AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, especially the amount of influence they have in the world and how they wield it. And the pricing often isn't that much different between a small VPS host and either a cloud provider or one of the larger VPS providers (Akamai/Linode, Digital Ocean, etc.) - larger providers have economies of scale, but smaller providers don't have as much overhead for paying sales and C-suite.
There's also the human touch in terms of who you talk to: a lot of the smallest VPS hosts are 1-2 people, both technical, so customer support = sysadmin = contact for everything.
If the only thing you need is "server, accessible via the internet, always online", and you're not interested in all the vendor lock-in masquerading as useful services offered by the big cloud providers, then small VPS hosts are 100% the way to go. For mid-sized servers they're cheaper (i.e., stuff that wouldn't be free on the big clouds, but not "I want a petaflop"), with more transparent pricing (I pay $12, every month. If I get inundated with traffic, I'll get cut off until I choose to pay more).
I could pay like 30 bucks a month for an absolutely overspecc'd VPS (64GB/16c) that would cost around 20X on AWS (According to ChatGPT; which sounds about right based on the last time I cared to even look into it)
Does it have a billion 9's of reliability? No, but I don't care, it has literally never not worked when I've used it
Customer Service so far has been human, but that will vary greatly for the provider
I also use a different provider for work related hosting, and the reduced latency of being within 20 ms of the DC has been probably the single biggest (perceived) perf improvement my users have ever seen, specially on the legacy webforms platform we recently decomissioned (We're a bit too geographically far for most Datacenters of most large providers)
I'd use digital ocean over AWS for any SMB or lean startup (so... anyone not attached to an infinite money hose that has to either scale to NEED AWS, or die trying) just because of 1) their UI not being broken glass you have to crawl over and 2) not having eight trillion features that make doing simple things hard and 3) pricing
I have a dedicated server at one provider with $0.30/TB overage, and it's that cheapest I've ever seen. This provider appears to optimize for bandwidth–heavy use, advertising their connectivity heavily.
A fixed plan that is not so flexible, not pay-as-you-go, but predictable and economical. Elastic cloud are elastic in terms of that you can change the compute you want, you can change the storage, either block or object, and you can use their premium network as much as you can, long as you have the money and got clearance on the end of the month. Scaling is therefore what those elastic cloud offers, albeit in a premium price.
Meanwhile, small service providers might not actually need those premium features, and just want something that is cheap and makes economical sense. They don't need the state-of-the-art hardware and just want something that works.
That's why while the AAGO (AWS, Azure, GCP and Oracle) attracted a lot of big corpo, that is, almost all of Forbes 500s used them, DigitalOcean and Vultr, with their $5 plan, is those who won the small businesses.
I used a vps service hosted in a country with strong digital privacy laws to host a personal wireguard+pihole vpn. I could probably think up a decent argument why that privacy with the smaller guy was only nominal but I could absolutely think up a good argument why doing that on a big name would have no privacy guarantees at all, especially as someone who would be in the bottom rung payment-wise.
Never had problems with downtime and I payed, like, 40 bucks a year over 3 years. I think I had to restart the thing once because of something dumb I did on my end.
The terms of use of Lightsail say you can't use it in a way that's intended to reduce your costs over EC2. So they have more free bandwidth, but you're not allowed to intentionally send your traffic through Lightsail to avoid the extortion of EC2 bandwidth pricing. They have cheaper CPU, but you're not allowed to use 100% of your CPU.
Very much like a similarly priced VPS though. It lets me persuade people to use a VPS because it is from a familiar big brand. I have come across a lot of people who use EC2 (usually just a single instance) when a VPS would work fine for them.
You cannot use Lightsail to work around EC2 costs, but you can use Lightsail instead of using EC2.
The only advantage is cheapness, for personal use.
If you’re a government agency or a company you don’t care about saving $14/month, you want a secure provider. And these hosts are not secure, you’re basically just on your own.
Without hiring/being a cloud expert, it's hard to be sure that you didn't leave some door wide open due to a configuration error. Both approaches offer more than enough opportunities to royally screw up.
If you're a government agency or anyone for whom a security failure costs more than sending an apology letter, you should really have your equipment in a locked rack, if not on prem.
Small VPS hosts oversell like crazy and they offer much lower prices. Also their reliability might be worse, because they don't migrate VM between hosts.
AWS EC2 does not migrate between hosts - They want you to pay more for redundancy, and they encourage you to use all the tools (paying for every single byte processed or transferred, of course). And if it is goes down, it is because you didn't follow AWS best practices (= paying even more)
Illegal according to whom? The servers are usually located in places where things such as sharing music, copyrighted or not under U.S. law, is not illegal.
Providers who go out of their way to avoid KYC tend to attract the types of customers who do things that are illegal in any country.
Not all of the people who want to avoid KYC are doing something illegal ... but all of the people who are doing something illegal are looking for a no-KYC provider.
This is why I moved off of Azure and over to Hetzner's US VPS's. For what I was deploying (a few dozen websites, some relatively complex .NET web apps, some automated scripts, etc.), the pricing on Azure just wasn't competitive. But worse for me was the complexity; I found that using Azure encouraged me to introduce more and more complex deployment pipelines, when all I really needed was Build the container -> SCP it into a blue/green deployment scheme on a VPS -> flip a switch after testing it.
They give potentially worse pricing on a lot of the basic things (egress bandwidth, basic VM hosting, storage pricing) because their real value-add are all the extra managed services they offer on top of those things, the scale they're able to offer, and the more enterprise features.
If you're using AWS/GCP/Azure to just host a couple of VMs for a small group you're massively overpaying.
I haven't been professionally involved in AWS in some time, and never was involved in pricing.
Personally, the only thing I know of that is a true deal vs. competition is cold storage of data. Using the s3 glacier tiers for long term data that is saved solely for emergencies is really cheap, something like $1/100GB a month or less.
AWS is usually not the cheapest EVER when it comes to offerings like EC2. If you aren't doing cloud-native or serverless at AWS, you're probably spending too much.
Glacier Deep Archive is around $1/TB/month. This is also about the good deal price for storage servers right now, although Glacier offers redundancy which storage servers don't.
Quite the opposite. They have mindshare lock–in and don't face competitive pressure to reduce prices. AWS boasts it never increased prices but it also never reduced them by much, even as hardware got an order of magnitude cheaper.
> They're selling all their capabilities; using them as a VPS is like using a battleship to cut cheese.
A lot of people do it.
People feel the battleship is safe and familiar. For most businesses the extra cost is not even noticed. Even a small business spending $500/month on hosting instead of $50 is not going to notice.
Also, if something goes wrong (e.g. your AWS region goes down) its far easier to explain to a manager or client that "its Amazon's fault and lots of stuff is down", rather than "its Digital Ocean's fault".
You have never seen a small business then. A local shop is not spending $10k to host their website. Lots of VPS hosts have products aimed at this market so it must he significant in aggregate.
My point is small businesses tend to be owner managed and therefore more cost sensitive and the costs are still not a significant factor. AS businesses get bigger its even less significant and its other people's money.
AWS outbound data is as much as 75x the cost of eg Hetzner.
I view a large percentage of "cloud" usage like Teslas stock price: it's completely detached from reality by people who have drunk the kool aid and can't get out.
Predictable and extremely low costs for less critical stuff. My 2 main ones are respectively around 4 and 8 EUR per _year_.
I use them to run wireguard to evade geoblocks when I'm travelling, a few redundant monitoring scripts alerting me of reachability issues of more critical stuff I care about, they serve as contingency access channels to my home (and home assistant) if my primary channels are down.
I get no support, no updates, it's all on me - which is fine, it allows me to stay current and not lose hands-on practice on skills which I anyway need for my job (and which are anyway my passion). I don't even get an entire IPv4 - I get.... 1/3000th of it? (21 ports, the rest are forwarded to other customers). Suits me fine.