Since we had a brief discussion (read: I ranted about how much I disliked DigitalOcean) about server (mostly VPS) hosters out there, how about a thread to discuss the if's, why's, do's and dont's of hosting services out there. Questions about recommendations belong here too. I'll actually start with one myself.

The number of services and / or servers I own continously increases and there are some, if few, actual people using them. I should finally get some sort of monitoring up and running. Ideally, the monitoring host would reside nowhere near the rest of my servers, so .. recommend me a hoster.

I was thinking about going with scaleway, but would be open to suggestions. KVM is a must since I don't like containerization, ideally the use of custom images would be supported. Contract on a monthly, not yearly base.

I've just spun up an instance with Vultr and I've been really pleased with them. It's 100% KVM instances on SSDs, their pricing is very similar to the others I've had experience with (Digital Ocean and Linode) and they provide custom image support. Getting OpenBSD up and running was a breeze. I found I didn't really miss Digital Ocean's DNS service and so far Vultr has been great. Highly recommended.

I got a Digital Ocean instance running Ubuntu.
Since I've got the $100 coupon from the GH student pack it means it's all free.
I'm satisfied with it. There's no bandwidth limit and I'm not running anything cpu intensive.

I also have a shell account on OVH but I don't have much to say about it.

My last vps run on host1.no for iotek. It's stable.

I use DigitalOcean for a very small site I own. It's pretty slow but I am using the cheapest hosting they have. They won't let me use my GH student code though, which has annoyed me a good deal.

I've recently start renting a dedibox SC at online.net, a french provider. I chose the cheapest box, but still, I have a real bare metal server for 6€/month (around 8.80$ I think). They provide standard base images, but as you're running on real hardware, abd can boot from rescue live images, it's easy to bootdtrap a new system: http://blog.z3bra.org/2015/08/install-al...nenet.html.

The SC box doesn't have it, but all others provide a KVM over IP, which can also help for traditional installations.
Their services seems pretty good so far. tickets get answered in less than 10 minutes, and they also have their own IRC server for support.

Quote:I've just spun up an instance with Vultr and I've been really pleased with them. It's 100% KVM instances on SSDs, their pricing is very similar to the others I've had experience with (Digital Ocean and Linode) and they provide custom image support. Getting OpenBSD up and running was a breeze. I found I didn't really miss Digital Ocean's DNS service and so far Vultr has been great. Highly recommended.

Since most of my VPS already are with Vultr this isn't 'really' an option. Though I may just use an exotic location such as Japan. But that comes with it's own set of problems.

Quote:The SC box doesn't have it, but all others provide a KVM over IP, which can also help for traditional installations.

Which annoys the hell out of me. As well as that one of my IPv4 addresses was listed on half a dozen blacklists because the customer before me screw'd up. :(

Note that only the SC box (the cheapest one) doesn't include a KVM by default. All other boxes have this service. Also, you can ask them to install a KVM on your box for 12 hours, so you can connect via VNC.

Quote:Also, you can ask them to install a KVM on your box for 12 hours, so you can connect via VNC.

You can? Last time I did that they wanted money for it. So I just debootstrapped the encrypted Debian myself.

I use Misshosting: https://misshosting.se/

It's a Swedish hoster that I use to host my (very) small website for about a dollar a month. It's pretty good so far but it is limited to only one MySQL Database.

(07-09-2015, 11:47 AM)dtnt Wrote:

Quote:Also, you can ask them to install a KVM on your box for 12 hours, so you can connect via VNC.

You can? Last time I did that they wanted money for it. So I just debootstrapped the encrypted Debian myself.

Sure you can, at least, that's what they told me on the IRC support channel

on the cheap and /mostly/ stable side of VPS things, there's http://www.cloudatcost.com/ hosted in canada. They have an interesting option to pay a one time price for a VPS and call it good - about a year ago they had a sale so I dropped $50 on two of their smallest VMs and they've been decent for little debian boxes for hosting random things/seedboxes. I host http://neeasade.net from there.

(07-09-2015, 05:22 PM)neeasade Wrote: on the cheap and /mostly/ stable side of VPS things, there's http://www.cloudatcost.com/ hosted in canada. They have an interesting option to pay a one time price for a VPS and call it good - about a year ago they had a sale so I dropped $50 on two of their smallest VMs and they've been decent for little debian boxes for hosting random things/seedboxes. I host http://neeasade.net from there.

a one time $35 is pretty nice.

I vaguely remember when they popped up a year or two back, there was lots of drama involved. But might give them a shot again, for 35$ for once. Thanks for the hint!