Show HN: Tiny VPSs without exhausting IPv4 addresses

by vznatvps • 12 years ago

95 81 12 years ago

Seems like a cool idea, what are the chances of getting dedicated IPv6?

vznatvps30• 12 years ago

We're introducing it ASAP. Currently we can provide clients with a tunnelled IPv6 address to an Amsterdam POP. This still offers good speeds and adds little latency. If you desire this then please submit a ticket and we can set it up.

Also if anyone is interested in how this is technically setup then I wrote an [article][0]

[0] http://blog.definedcodehosting.com/openvz-nat-vps

axyjo• 12 years ago

Cool idea. Have you considered submitting it to lowendbox.com?

vznatvps30• 12 years ago

We've submitted and we're just waiting for staff to get round to our offer. Thanks for the feedback!

graystevens• 12 years ago

Sounds similar to http://lowendspirit.com/ where you get a a port range on an IPv4 address, and x amount of dedicated IPv6 addresses. Super cheap, great for a private VPN or two.

vznatvps30• 12 years ago

We're offering a similar service, spoke to the owner of LES yesterday who is quite [happy][0] with us offering the community a similar service since it's not really profitable but more as an effort to help the community and offer something cool.

[0] http://lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/658755/#Comment_658...

bryanlarsen• 12 years ago

How about putting HAProxy or nginx in front of those servers to make port 80 available?

vznatvps30• 12 years ago

We're happy to do that for any clients via a ticket. We cannot guarantee it for everyone since it takes time, but we are certainly happy to do it.

swinglock• 12 years ago

There's a ticket system? When hitting the ordering page you have to tick a box that says the services has no support.

tacticus2• 12 years ago

Using something like hipache (or hipache-nginx or even some service written internally) you could probably cut down on your human interaction time.

Combine that with SNI hosting (unfortunately we would have to give you the keys for it)

dspillett2• 12 years ago

There are quite a few VPS services out there that offer IPv6 only.

With those if you want to make anything on the services accessible via IPv4 you need to do it via another route, such as a VPN (or even just a port forward) to/from somewhere where you have an address to spare or for websites perhaps somewhere where you run nginx as a reverse proxy. In fact some infrastructure-as-a-service companies like CloudFlair offer this as a service: your users talk to them via IPv4 or IPv6 but they always talk to you via IPv6.

Some offer IPv6 with "IPv4 NAT" which allows you to call out via IPv4 as normal and may include calling in but not on standard ports (i.e. not 80 for HTTP, 22 for SSH, and so forth).

spindritf• 12 years ago

Some also offer reverse proxy for web hosting so it works on :80. I don't know if/how they deal with ssl. You can probably do something going off SNI.

dspillett2• 12 years ago

It would have to be SNI for SSL unless they had an absolute shed load of IPv4 addresses space available, though if they are charging for the service that would increase the chance of getting a dedicated IPv4 upon which you have sole use of port 443.

cwyers• 12 years ago

When you say "Choice of Linux OS," what are you currently offering?

vznatvps30• 12 years ago

We're currently offering 32bit and 64bit varieties of the following: CentOS 6, Debian 7, Ubuntu 12.04, Ubuntu 14.04. If there is a custom template you desire we can probably provide it, just PM us or drop a ticket.

iamtew• 12 years ago

Interesting service. I've seen other places doing the same, and I really should brush up on my IPv6 knowledge..

As a side-note; I'm getting mixed-content warnings when accessing your website. You have the PureCSS framework included with a http link, instead of https. yui.yahooapis.com doesn't support https, so you need to host it yourself to get rid of this warning. You also have a picture hosted on imgur.com, which does support https.

Maybe consider updating your links to not include http/https and just use :// instead?

vznatvps30• 12 years ago

Thanks!

Fixed all of the external content warnings, thanks for spotting that.

dublinben• 12 years ago

You could probably also save some bandwidth, because you're only displaying the top 400 pixels of that background image. There's no need to load the entire thing.

yuropa2• 12 years ago

Any chance of seeing OpenBSD on this? It seems like you've mentioned doing custom templates if requested.

vznatvps30• 12 years ago

Unfortunately OpenVZ virtualisation only supports Linux OSs because they share the same kernel. Since *BSD is not Linux based they can't be installed. Sorry about this!

yuropa2• 12 years ago

No problem, I must have spaced on the fact that this is OpenVZ based, thanks for the quick response!

bnejad• 12 years ago

Cool service. Not that it matters much but on your linked page the "Unmanaged" and RAM amount are in different row positions for each Mini

vznatvps30• 12 years ago

Oh wow. That would annoy me too, thanks for noticing it. Fixed!

chanux• 12 years ago

nitpick: You can run you're own scripts

deckiedan• 12 years ago

Very cool - I could see this as a very useful tool to have for personal git repos, email, and as a proxy for getting around firewalls / testing sites from another country (geoIP stuff).

How much free space is left on each VPS with the operating system installed?

vznatvps30• 12 years ago

They all take roughly 0.75GB of space since they're minimal installs.

Yeah OpenVPN works fine on this setup.

bluedevil2k3• 12 years ago

The shortage of IPv4 addresses is somewhat of a misnomer - there are a few sites selling huge ranges of them for about $10/address

vznatvps30• 12 years ago

They might sell them for that but when you're selling to a "low end" market at £4/year $10/address is quite expensive. Especially when we don't need a range bigger than a /27.

I agree there are still IPv4 addresses about but this teaches people that they are running out and we should look for other solutions.

bluedevil2k3• 12 years ago

You can buy them in /22 blocks, but if you only need 32 addresses, then I guess that is overkill.

kstrauser4• 12 years ago

At $10/IP, I'd say "shortage" is pretty well defensible.

We'll never run out of IPv4 addresses. We'll just reach a point where each one has a mortgage-sized pricetag. (Well, we would if we were stuck with IPv4, anyway.)

fotoblur• 12 years ago

"This means that when you host a website you will have to append a port to the end"

No thanks.

cpach• 12 years ago

This is probably not primarily intended for hosting web sites.

vznatvps30• 12 years ago

We can reverse proxy you if needed. If you don't like it then this service probably isn't for you.

ForHackernews• 12 years ago

What are you policies around running Tor nodes?

vznatvps30• 12 years ago

We forbid it. Considering you only have 50GB traffic usage / month I would not advise it even if we did allow it.

drazvan• 12 years ago

How about non-exit nodes. I'm actually working on an app (Bitcoin-related) that receives commands from satellite-connected devices (very low bandwidth) and then relays those over the Tor network to a processing server hosted by the user. So this would require a Tor node on the server to get the satellite request and forward it over Tor.

Would this be an acceptable use? Bandwidth requirements would be extremely low (I would say less than 100MB/month in 99% of the cases).

bluedino• 12 years ago

64MB? 128MB? What applications are there for that little RAM except maybe an IRC shell?

hrjet• 12 years ago

I was running a Twitter client (servlet + Postgres) in a 64MB VPS not too long ago. There were about ~2000 active users.

vznatvps30• 12 years ago

You can run a whole LAMP stack on that.

EDIT: That being the 64MB.

kephra• 12 years ago

even worse: 64MB of VZ memory is much less then 64MB of real memory, as VZ limits allocated and not dirty memory.

Kadin• 12 years ago

Statically-rendered websites (Jekyll, Blosxom, etc.) would work fine.

Though having a weird port number on a blog URL would probably cause me to think twice before clicking on it, at least from a bare-metal Windows machine; it makes me think "botnet dropper".

vznatvps30• 12 years ago

We can offer clients the ability to reverse proxy their domain to their VPS so they wouldn't need to append a port.

simon_vetter• 12 years ago

I would definitely offer native, unrestricted ipv6 access from day one if I was going to roll out restricted ipv4 connectivity. Not sure why they did not deploy it, but it seems like you can get ipv6 from a lot of other low-end, cheap providers.

vznatvps30• 12 years ago

Expensive from the DC. We're introducing it ASAP. Currently we can provide clients with a tunnelled IPv6 address to an Amsterdam POP. This still offers good speeds and adds little latency. If you desire this then please submit a ticket and we can set it up.

devicenull2• 12 years ago

IPv6 is expensive from your DC? What's their reasoning there? Most places are pretty much giving IPv6 space away.

vznatvps30• 12 years ago

Good news we've got IPv6 support coming by the end of tomorrow (hopefully). All existing clients will get an IPv6 address and all new clients will obviously get one.

tacticus2• 12 years ago

Only one ipv6 address? Surely you are going to have a /48 or larger why are you not providing more addresses?

xanderstrike• 12 years ago

I'm confused. £4 ($6.83) for a 64mb RAM, 3GB VM vs. $5 (£2.93) 512mb RAM, 20GB SSD from DigitalOcean I'm seeing zero advantage and a whole lot of disadvatage for my extra $1.83. Honestly, you can colo a Raspberry Pi and have a better machine for cheaper.

DigitalOcean even has ipv6 now. What's the point?

dewey• 12 years ago

£4/year, digitalocean is $5/month

nacs• 12 years ago

The £4 is per year (ie: compared to $60 for the year with DO).

vznatvps30• 12 years ago

We offer it for £4/year not month. SO significantly cheaper.

A Raspberry Pi would not provide better performance than the E3 we have.

Anyway an idea: it's fun. Trying to run a whole LAMP stack or a RoR stack on 64MB RAM is more fun than not using all your resources. Also we're cheap and people like that. We might not always beat them in performance but we don't break the bank either.

StavrosK• 12 years ago

I was about to post the same comment as the GP. I thought this was per month, and was going to say it was horribly overpriced. Now it's not :P

throwaway-6836• 12 years ago

Coupon code INTROLEBT for £2/year Mini 64 and £4/year Mini 128.

You can use CloudFlare as a reverse proxy for "native" IPv4 and IPv6.

heyalexej2• 12 years ago

Any chance of accepting Bitcoin?

vznatvps30• 12 years ago

We were waiting till Stripe supported it, but we've just applied to Bitpay. If you submit a ticket I can keep you updated: https://definedcodehosting.com/client/submitticket.php?step=...

vznatvps30• 12 years ago

We now accept Bitcoin via BitPay.

gergles• 12 years ago

There is some arbitrary length limit on root passwords that isn't disclosed anywhere (or reported if you exceed it.) I had to truncate my password several times to get it to actually work.

vznatvps30• 12 years ago

Oops, this is a limit set by WHMCS not us. You can always change it in your VPS.

n2j3• 12 years ago

following root passwords seem to fail too..

4cX|%:8emq94L8X

,6r7oh97S|b"+1Z

2#E24IC^&G(x47P

I tried an alphanumeric of the same length (15 characters) and it worked. So i doubt it's a length issue.

edwintorok• 12 years ago

Any plans to support Xen? Then one could run Mirage unikernels (http://openmirage.org/) ...

vznatvps30• 12 years ago

At this price, probably not. In the future with different plans, maybe.

kstrauser4• 12 years ago

May I offer a free piece of advice? Hire a proofreader. There are so many grammar mistakes, like run-ons and sentence fragments, that it's a little hard to follow. It looks amateurish, and I think you've worked too hard to make people question your professionalism?

vznatvps30• 12 years ago

Thanks for the advice, I'll get someone to proofread it however at this price I can assure you that we have to dedicate the majority of our budget to technicalities.

kstrauser4• 12 years ago

I understand! In the mean time, I opened ticket 464188 with some suggestions.

varkson• 12 years ago

I'm glad you didn't charge OP for that advice.

kstrauser4• 12 years ago

I thought about it, but there's all the paperwork and the taxes and such, you know.

sfeng• 12 years ago

I would think about adding a virtual host-based proxy. That way users could provide you with their domain(s), and you could forward traffic on port 80/443 for that host to the appropriate vm.

vznatvps30• 12 years ago

We have that, clients can just submit a ticket and we're happy to do it.

ridgewell• 12 years ago

I can't tell if this is just shameless advertising.

Just for the record, LowEndSpirit.com has done the same thing well before this was launched.

Show HN: Tiny VPSs without exhausting IPv4 addresses

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