Ask HN: Where to get cheap VPS with big storage?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25713160

by fileeditview • 6 years ago

55 50 6 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I am currently working on a self-hosted image sharing platform as my January side-project (Will post a Show HN when it's done).

Can you recommend VPS providers that offer cheap/reasonable plans with big storage?

SSD is not needed for this.. I would even prefer conventional HDDs if that saves money/offers more storage. Processing power and RAM should also be secondary as long as it's enough to scale images in a reasonable time.

867-53092• 6 years ago

Contabo are the best for GB per €

fileeditview4• 6 years ago

Thanks, looks pretty Good. I still would have hoped there are VPSes with low specs but storage in the low terabytes. Guess I found a niche that is not really in demand.

dirtnugget• 6 years ago

I can also recommend contabo for exceptional pricing and service. They are very quick and friendly to respond. Maybe you can work out a custom plan with them if you contact them.

fancythat• 6 years ago

I personally know two people that lost all data with Contabo, so be careful.

welterde2• 6 years ago

When was that roughly (recently or years ago?) and what was the cause?

In any case one should never forget that RAID is not the same thing as backup (which applies to a lot of not quite RAID solutions as well).

Matsta2• 6 years ago

Contabo are quite cheap, but BuyVM's storage slabs at $5/month for 1tb seem cheaper and probably have better performance: https://buyvm.net/block-storage-slabs/

867-53092• 6 years ago

thanks, that's very cheap

c.e. minimum extra $2/mo. for their cheapest VPS (required)

ddorian433• 6 years ago

Lowest I've seen is https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/sx62 at 1.6€ / TB / month. Anyone seen lower ?

You should be extra careful on big servers with little bandwidth, you might need a month to fill/empty/rebalance them.

How will you host the images ? Metadata will become a bottleneck before hdd size.

Check out https://github.com/chrislusf/seaweedfs

fileeditview4• 6 years ago

Thanks but the audience is family & friends. Basically a solution for small circles of people that don't want to share their private images/videos on Google, Facebook, Flickr or similar.

I don't think metadata will be a bottleneck in this scenario.. but maybe I am just naïve here.

I also consider just running a small box in the basement with dynamic dns instead of using a VPS.

ddorian433• 6 years ago

No it won't matter for this scenario.

angrais• 6 years ago

> How will you host the images ? Metadata will become a bottleneck before hdd size.

Could you provide more details on this? Are you saying accessing the metadata will be a bottleneck (via E.g., a relational database)?

> You should be extra careful on big servers with little bandwidth, you might need a month to fill/empty/rebalance them.

Also, what do you mean by fill/rebalance in this context?

ddorian433• 6 years ago

Could you provide more details on this? Are you saying accessing the metadata will be a bottleneck (via E.g., a relational database)?

It's the problem of having too many small files. Explained here https://github.com/chrislusf/seaweedfs#introduction.

Also, what do you mean by fill/rebalance in this context?

Assuming you are replicating the data. You have to be careful of cascading failures if repairing replication is too slow because of slow network/disk-io/cpu.

ksec2• 6 years ago

You really should be looking at good old fashion Dedicated Metal if you really want low pricing.

OVH, Hetzner or ScaleWay. Apart from Hetzner they other two also offer VPS as well.

fileeditview4• 6 years ago

I am coming to the same conclusion. What looks intriguing are the Hetzner server auctions. Didn't know ScaleWay yet. Will check them out too. Thanks

teknopaul2• 6 years ago

If you want lots of baremetal storage space for a test project put an old laptop on the Internet and use tinc to create a vpn that the laptop reconnects to if the network drops or changes IP. A cheapo virtual server $5/month with Linux can have terabytes of storage while the Internet is on at home. If you put the laptop behind a router security is not an issue. Cant beat this price. With second hand pc hardware this is essentially free storage. I live in bcn where domestic Internet is gigabit/fiber to the premises and never drops. yumv.

teknopaul2• 6 years ago

http://tinc-vpn.org/ works like a charm and I found easier than openvpn. Easy to run in a lxc container.

radu_floricica2• 6 years ago

Hetzner has a pretty nice VPS offering nowadays. Love their admin interface.

cfjgvjh• 6 years ago

I love Hetzner dedicated server offerings since the price can't be beat, but they have mediocre peering/connection speeds.

Granted I'm in Japan, but I get like 1/12th the speed I do from an Scaleway dedi in France.

gjvnq• 6 years ago

Is you are in the US or Brazil, https://absam.io might be an interesting choice.

Their cheapest plan is 30 BRL (about 5.50 USD) for 1 GB or RAM and 50 GB of storage.

torqu3e• 6 years ago

Racknerd with a discount code from lowendbox. They let you buy storage separately as well.

veeti• 6 years ago

Have you considered cheap object storage providers like Backblaze B2?

achairapart• 6 years ago

This is a good option. By offloading your storage you could save both money AND time, as there is no maintenance (don't underestimate that).

B2 also offers a compatible S3 API and it's something like $.005/Gb/Month.

sairamkunala• 6 years ago

bandwidth through Cloudflare or the alliance they formed is free.

slooonz• 6 years ago

For cheap HDD storage I still haven’t found better than Scaleway Dedibox SATA offers : https://www.scaleway.com/en/dedibox/start/start-2-s-sata/

mobilio• 6 years ago

Try Kimsufi or SoyouStart

stonesweep• 6 years ago

If your project can to use old-CPU servers with TB sized drives in them (DIY bare metal), three providers I've found with the lowest prices: dacentec.com, joesdatacenter.com, nocix.net

dvfjsdhgfv• 6 years ago

Hetzner SX - you get 40 TB storage for under €80/month, transfer included. It's hard to beat.

spiffytech• 6 years ago

LowEndBox (the go-to site for bargain-bin deals on VPSs) has a page dedicated to preferred high-storage vendors: https://lowendbox.com/tag/highstorage/

I use LetBox for some projects and have been happy with them. Their high-storage plans go up to 10TB disk at $48.30/mo. In my experience their disk performance isn't stellar, but for lots of use cases it's more than adequate. Note that LetBox explicitly disallows media piracy on their servers (not your use case, but that's the context in which a lot of folks seek out high-storage servers). https://my.letbox.com/cart.php?a=confproduct&i=2

There's also WalkerServers. They rent out bare metal servers by the month, going up to 144TB at €255/mo. Their plans are more expensive than LetBox, but you should get better performance since it's bare metal, and if you buy your server in the Leaseweb datacenter, torrenting is allowed. The owner conducts a lot of customer service on Reddit and people seem pleased with his services.

Finally, for your specific use case, I would suggest considering AWS S3, Backblaze B2, or similar. Local disk space could easily be a limitation for folks looking to self-host image space; I have a friend with multiple TiB of images in Google Photos he's looking to move somewhere else. I have 30GiB of photos, which rules out lots of cheap VPS plans. Lots of folks also won't spring for more than the cheapest VPS plan they can get, or they'll load up your software on an old computer with modest storage. Local storage also makes your users responsible for backups/disk failures for some of the most important data they own, and most users really don't implement backup well. Putting the photos into a highly-durable, infinitely-scalable, cost-effective object store with push-button backup/versioning settings carries a lot of advantages for this sort of project. It doesn't have to be either/or -- you could support both -- but I definitely suggest supporting object stores.

fileeditview4• 6 years ago

Good input, thanks!

I agree that there certain limitations with local disk space. However one of my main objectives was to get my data away from cloud infrastructures. It sure is different to just put your photos on Google Images or pay for cloud storage which you access from your service.

Still I want to have full control over where and how my data is stored and I want a simple platform (at least for now, this is an MVP). So yes I agree that cloud storages have a clear value proposition but it is only an option for the future.

I also intend to at least offer some tools/reminders for backups. In the end it is the user's responsibility. Beside self-hosting on rented hardware I also think about putting a real box into my basement. This is obviously only a sensible solution for sharing in a small circle. But that's what my project was intended for.

I will again have a look at LowEndBox and also LetBox.

zxcvbn4038• 6 years ago

I had not looked at VPS solutions in a while but in the US it looked to me like the majority are just reselling servers from a handful of data center operators - some sort of affiliate marketing setup. When you start comparing ip ranges and DC locations you see a pattern. Anyone else noticed this?

erikrothoff• 6 years ago

Do you have any idea who these data center operators are? I’m looking to skip the middleman :)

pdimitar3• 6 years ago

Can anybody recommend affordable server hosting with ECC RAM?

ltn2• 6 years ago

Europe or US? Dedi or VPS? If you want really, really cheap have a look at offers at forums such as https://talk.lowendspirit.com/categories/offers - but be warned, those are mostly small to tiny companies, some even one-man shows, but you won't find anything cheaper. But good enough for personal projects and game servers.

pdimitar3• 6 years ago

I'd prefer EU, if it's dedicated or VPS is of little consequence to me. I simply want a box where I can unload encrypted backups is all.

If I can get 10 to 300 GB for something between 5 to 50 Euro I'd be happy.

chickentom• 6 years ago

You don't write how much data you currently need, but I can recommend to start with time4vps and their storage VPS plans; https://www.time4vps.com/storage-vps/

I currently use their 9.99 EUR/mon plan with 2 TB storage for my Nextcloud installation.

Of course - at some point you will need more space and performance, and dedicated Hetzner (or similar) will be a better value-for-money option to continue with.

Matsta2• 6 years ago

As many have said, LowEndBox is a great resource. However it's not as updated as frequently as it used to be. The forums however are still very active: https://www.lowendtalk.com/

https://www.serverhunter.com/ is a solid site for searching for providers, much easier than using LEB.

BuyVM https://buyvm.net/ are my go to provider. Been using them for years and they are probably one of (if not the highest) ranked providers on LEB/LET. The recently upgraded all their nodes to Ryzen 3900X's and NVME SSD's.

Their block storage is stupid cheap at like $5 per 1tb - https://buyvm.net/block-storage-slabs/

7263255• 6 years ago

If you need near-line storage, consider using AWS S3, Backblaze's B2 or DigitalOcean's Spaces. All of these will require some kind of transaction time to do things with the files (we're talking milliseconds to a couple of seconds).

If you need on-line storage, such as for a database, then consider AWS with a big EBS volume or Digital Ocean's Volume Block Store.

All of these can be used with the smallest/cheapest VPS instance types... so you can pay $2/month for a micro-sized EC2 reserved instance and attach a lot of storage. A downside to this is that most providers top out at 16TB, which might be a scaling problem depending on what your business is. Even small image hosts are in the multi-petabyte range.

Triv888• 6 years ago

I pay $10/year for my VPS but it has only 10 or 15gb... Check out http://www.lowendstock.com/ for more options. Mine is probably as stable as Google's servers...

oarsinsync• 6 years ago

Backblaze B2 storage + Cloudflare CDN fronting it.

Pay Backblaze for uploads + storage. Free download + distribution via Cloudflare.

Will scale with you.

freedomben• 6 years ago

Second for Backblaze B2. I adopted it slowly but now I'm a massive fan. The pricing is just so reasonable for what you get and the tools/APIs are great.

cweagans• 6 years ago

+1 from me as well. I've been using B2 a lot more lately and it's really just excellent. You could do a lot with a tiny Digital Ocean droplet for your application code + B2 & Cloudflare for serving assets.

tumidpandora• 6 years ago

AWS Lightsail + S3

asignorini• 6 years ago

I agree. They have a $3.5/month plan with 1 core, 512MB, 20GB and 1TB out that's hard to beat.

Depending on the use case you can mount an S3 bucket as local storage or integrate with the API and serve the images directly from there (either via one-time tokens or using hard to guess UUIDs).

If you want others to setup their-own quickly, you also need to consider providing some CloudFormation, Terraform, etc.

lovelearning• 6 years ago

I'd use Hetzner's Storage Box [1] for storage shared by their 3-core 4GB VPSes [2] for compute. The compute nodes themselves have higher local storage compared to most other popular VPS services at lower prices.

[1] https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box

[2] https://www.hetzner.com/cloud

Ask HN: Where to get cheap VPS with big storage?

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