I want to selfhost my own personal website. This is just for fun, as a hobby and to show off my skills to others. nothing big.
I have my own server home but I want to have something that’s separate from my personal stuff.
I do not need any support, meaning it can be as cheap as possible. I do not yet know how much RAM or CPU or storage I need. I guess CPU > 2GHz and 2GB RAM should be enough to start.
daily/weekly backup with rsync in case the hoster goes out of business.
I do not need a domain, I will use a dynamic dns hoster.
Can recommend Hetzner (German IP). Good value and so far solid.
Before that I used OVH (French IP) for years but it ended badly. First they locked me out of my account for violating 2FA which I had not asked for or been told about, and would not provide any recourse except sending them a literal signed paper letter, which I had to do twice because the first one they ignored. A nightmare which went on for weeks. And then, cherry on the cake, my VPS literally went up in smoke when their Strasbourg data center burned down! Oops! Looks like your VPS is gone, sorry about that, here’s a voucher for six months free hosting! Months later they discovered a backup but the damage was done. Never again.
DigitalOcean has droplets that only cost $4/mo. I use one for a small, static site and a gopher server.
Contabo
netcup
I second that. I’m using Contabo for years without any problem.
Thirded.
They occasionally upgrade services for free, and rarely raise prices. They support a variety of base Linux images, including Arch (which, when I first switched to them, was rare). The control board is functional, and they’ve got all the features needed to implement VPN subnets, DKIM, etc. without having to use the DNS provider’s tools (assuming you are using a different provider). There’s also a command-line tool for managing your VPSes with them. Reasonably priced, the usual array of options from cheap to expensive, easy to add resources, and so on. Servers in the US and Germany (and maybe others? I haven’t added a VPS in a while).
When I first started self-hosting, not all of this was standard. I can’t say I’ve looked at the market in a few years, so perhaps their offerings are standard now, but when I moved from another hosting provider, Contabo stood out. I have been quite happy; perhaps the best thing I can say about them is that I haven’t had to contact their technical support in the past couple of years.
P.S. the only cautionary thing I’ll say it’s that they’re a German company. While you can never trust any VPS provider from a data security POV, Germany is a 5-eyes country, and so sits in my “least trustworthy” list; as in, they’re least likely to put up any resistance if one of the surveillance states asks for access to your data, or to tell you about it before they do. For me, this doesn’t matter, and frankly I don’t have enough knowledge to choose a better option if I needed it. Since I don’t, and since I’m not using my servers for anything that’s currently considered subversive, it isn’t yet a worry for me. But FYI.
Racknerd. I have two VPS with them for a total of $25/year. not as feature filled as any of the big players but it’s dirt cheap. Found them on https://lowendbox.com/
I use Netcup. Reliable, simple, great deals from time to time (such as Black Friday).
Depends on what you need:
- As cheap as possible, but actually want a VM: OCI free tier will be way bigger than you will probably need
- Happy paying money but still want to learn about Linux things: I’ve had good experiences with Scaleway
- I just want something I can set up and not think about: don’t use a VPS. Architect your site as a pure-static site, stick it in an S3 bucket. You’ll probably be within the free tier unless you do absolutely bonkers traffic, and once it’s running you can leave it alone for literal years without worrying about patches or upgrades
Love my Racknerd VPS.
Edit: Some deals here
I have had no problems with Racknerd… That being said I just use my VPS and a tunnel back to my home server but totally worth the $22 is cost me a year.
What’s with that crazy price jump from $23/year to $18/month? Doubling RAM and cores increases prices by 9x? 2GB RAM and 2 cores is $5-6 at Hetzner, no idea how they think $18/month for 1GB RAM and 2 cores is competitive in any way, that’s a bit of a dark pattern IMO…
Scummy, but not uncommon really. Bring in customers at the cheap tier and then once they’re in your ecosystem overcharge for the higher tiers.
Idk, most of the bigger VPS services don’t have anything like that. Yeah, they have higher tiers, but you usually get similar or better value as you go up.
Good point, I imagine you’re right! I haven’t shopped many VPS services, I was venting about the general practice I’ve seen in other services before.
Fair. Here are some that I find to be pretty consistently competitive:
- Vultr
- DigitalOcean
- Hetzner
I’ve used each and liked each. They’re rarely the absolute cheapest, but they are usually competitive at all tiers with no pretty much no shenanigans. I’m currently with Hetzner, which has been good for the few months I’ve been with them, but I’ve spent multiple years with the other two.
Avoro is really cheap and I can recommend them. If you are student, you might want to look into GitHub Student pack, which includes DigitalOcean credits.
Have a look at OVH, they have very good VPS prices
Oracle free vps. I run it for wireguard tunnel to circumvent CGNAT on my home connection. Shit company, yes, but works well for over a year. I run Ubuntu server on the VPS.
Yeah, those may work. Since you’ve one how does it look like? Are there blocked ports line SMTP? Are the IP good / aren’t blacklisted everywhere already? Thanks.
I was able to open any ports in NAT settings on my router and get access to my network. One day they pit me behind CGNAT. Wo i did the Wireguard tunnel connecting my tiny client ubuntu with outside VPS. Works like a charm. My operator can go screw themselves. I changed my DNS records to Cloudflare on my domain and pointed CF to my VPS server IP. So I can run everything through my domain.
Great, but what services are you hosting ? What ports you need?
Adguard Home DNS, Jellyfin, Gitea, Webmin, webmail, LibreSpeed, SSH access, Wanderer (trail database), Portainer, Apache2 web server and most likely more.
So, looks like tons of HTTP services and SSH.
Can you explain how to do it?
I’ve registered recently but cant spin up a vm because its full on my region.
What caveat should i aware of when using this service?
And what instance do you choose?
Thanks :D
My server is in Europe somewhere, I run Ubuntu server. Caveats… Doesn’t run on a gigiabit connection, but that is honestly not necessary. Once I got notification, that free instances are stopped when not in use for some time. After that they stopped it, I started it again and after that it just runs all the time.
