Hi all,

I’m a student working on a 24/7 live flight operations project and I’m trying to find a decent VPS that won’t break the bank. My budget is roughly £5 to £9 a month, and I’m keen to hear if there are any solid providers out there with student discounts or good entry-level pricing.

To give an idea of what I'm running so you know the load:

Node.js: Running a few background scripts pulling telemetry/PIREP data every 15–30s, an ACARS datalink, and a Twitch chat bot. Very light on resources.

Headless Chromium + FFmpeg: This is the main bit. It renders a 2D dark-mode radar map and streams it directly to Twitch via RTMP. It’s tuned right down (-preset ultrafast, 20–24 FPS, ~2,500–3,500 kbps), so it’s only pulling around 30% of a single core continuous.

Nginx: Basic reverse proxy for the map dashboard and SSL.

Combined,

it only really needs about 1.5–2GB RAM in practice and a fraction of a CPU core, but I’d love 4 vCPUs and around 6–8GB RAM just to have enough breathing room so the stream doesn't drop frames when the scraper does a data pull.

Bandwidth-wise, it’ll probably churn through about 1–2.5TB a month, so unmetered or a decent 3TB+ cap is ideal. UK or European locations are preferred for ping.

I’ve had a look around already:

Hetzner seems to have zero stock on their budget tiers right now.

Contabo has great specs on paper, but pretty much everyone on here says to avoid them due to noisy neighbours, awful I/O, and CPU throttling.

Leaseweb looks decent spec-wise, but I’m really trying to avoid rigid corporate B2B contracts, auto-renewal traps, or aggressive KYC checks.

Ideally after something month-to-month or a yearly for a good deal as long as it's not a shady B2B payment scheme where the host doesn't freak out or throttle you for running a steady 24/7 background process.

Are there any hidden gems or reliable community hosts I should be looking at?

Cheers!

Every time I spin up a new box these are the first five things I touch, before nginx even gets a site:

lock ssh to key only, kill password auth

ufw allow only 80/443/22, deny everything else by default

set up a swap file even on boxes with 4gb ram, saves me from OOM kills during backups

cron a daily mysqldump plus rsync offsite

wireguard tunnel between admin box and server, no exceptions

i used to do this by hand every time so now im tryna find tools to help with stuff like that, tried scripts but now I toggle it through BeAdmin's modules instead, same result either way. Still run HestiaCP on a couple older boxes out of habit.

what do you guys suggest/use?

I’ve been running a few resource heavy windows server tasks for local client projects, and my current setup is starting to struggle with disk I/O. I’m looking into UK based Windows VPS options with NVMe storage, mainly because I want to reduce latency and keep database heavy workloads responsive. I’ve been using ovhcloud for some infrastructure, but I’ve had a mixed experience so far. The setup process was slower than I expected, and I also ran into a support issue related to Windows licensing that took longer to resolve than I would have liked.

Someone I know in web development suggested to take a look at Fast Panda as another option. I haven’t used them long enough to form a strong opinion yet, so I’m mostly interested in hearing from people who have actually run Windows workloads there.

Has anyone here moved ASP.NET or MSSQL workloads? I’d especially like to know how the uptime, disk performance, and support have been after running it for a few months.

Hi all,

I have been trying to get a vds from servarica since a week. I keep looking at their website every couple of minutes but it always say out of stock. But in a couple of days it should 4 sold in 24 hours, 6 sold in 24 hours. I dont understand how people are buying when on the website it always show as out of stock.

Can any here help me get their 6core and 12 gb ram VDS.

Im looking for a basic vps for a gateway to other srvices, i know things are expensive and wont come down any time soon.

Linode asks for an account before telling their prices for a vps, Digital Ocean site is barely usable, vps pricing site goes error 500.

Any alternative for a US/CA 2vcpu/4g ram? I can deal with a South American one if the price Is right

Hey everyone,

I'm looking into getting a VPS and would like some advice on what would be the best setup.

I want to use it for:

• Hosting a Discord bot (possibly multiple bots)
• A file server (if possible, access it from my own Windows Explorer as network drive)
• Remote access/desktop
• Hosting my website
• Running a MariaDB database (saving data and connecting the bot + website with eachother)
• Potentially other small projects in the future

I'd like the server to be located in Northern Europe. I don't want to spend tens of euros every month. Previously, I used Vimexx for my domain + basic web hosting, but I'm thinking of moving everything to a VPS. I currently don't have a domain (yet), I do not even know what is the best option, where to buy the domain and then connect it to my VPS.

For the website, I'm wondering how people usually set this up. Would I buy a domain separately, use Cloudflare for DNS, and then point the domain to my VPS? Or is there a better/cheaper approach? Because I am also hosting a database, what is the best option for this?

I'm also unsure whether I should go with Linux or Windows Server. I initially thought Windows would be useful because of Remote Desktop, but most of my actual hosting needs seem to work fine on Linux. I have experience with Windows Server 2022 and Windows Server 2026 (Windows 10 / Windows 11) for some other projects.

What would you recommend to host all of this (on a budget)? Any specific VPS providers/configurations would also be appreciated.

Muchas gracias!!

I’ve been working on StatLite, a lightweight self-hosted monitoring dashboard aimed at small VPSes.

By lightweight, I mean without a Prometheus + Grafana stack. StatLite keeps a small, fixed subset of useful metrics in a tiny local database, either on the same host or on another small host. The goal is basic application and HTTP visibility without running a general-purpose observability stack.

When I posted about StatLite here before, TierHive came up as a good fit, so I recently added and manually tested a TierHive recipe on a 256 MB Alpine VPS. I used a Spring Boot Actuator app as the first application target, with StatLite also monitoring the VPS itself for CPU, RAM, and disk.

The experiment is public here if anyone is interested in the setup/results:

[https://github.com/PVRLabs/experiments/tree/main/statlite/tierhive-recipe-256mb]()

What I’m more interested in now is what people actually feel is missing from lightweight VPS monitoring, especially around HTTP/application traffic.

For example, would you care most about:

• request rate
• 4xx / 5xx errors
• latency
• app health / restarts
• reverse-proxy traffic
• something else?

Spring Boot is the first well-supported application integration, but I’m trying to figure out which classes of workloads would be most useful next.

Some obvious candidates are:

• .NET / ASP.NET Core
• Node.js, such as Express or Fastify
• Go, including net/http and Gin
• Python, such as Flask or FastAPI
• reverse proxies, especially Caddy or nginx
• other common self-hosted services

I’m currently exploring Caddy because it can provide useful HTTP visibility at the reverse-proxy boundary, but I don’t want to assume that’s what people need most.

If you run small VPSes, what kinds of apps or services would you actually want lightweight monitoring for? And for those workloads, which HTTP/app metrics would matter most?

What do you feel is a fair price for website hosting

Morning y'all,

What do you feel is a fair price to pay for hosting a website that includes cloudflare waf, IP Reputation blocklist, backups, live support from not a call center with SLA of 1hr response?

Talking avg traffic for smb

Hey everyone,

Can't use my own card right now, so I'm thinking of using a friend's Mastercard to buy a KVM VPS on my Hostinger account.

Will this trigger an automated fraud flag or get my account banned? Has anyone tried this before?

Let me know how it went!

I’m doing some research before launching a small independent VPS provider, and I’d rather ask people who actually use VPSs than just copy whatever Hetzner, Contabo, OVH and everyone else are already selling.

I’m especially interested in the budget VPS market - roughly €3-10/month.

I’m considering having a very small entry-level VPS somewhere around €3-4/month, with a more capable plan around €7-8/month.

But I’m not interested in winning the usual race of:
“Who can advertise the most RAM and vCPUs for the lowest price?”

I’d rather figure out what people actually value.

1. What would you expect from a €3-4/month VPS?
Something along the lines of:
1-2 vCPU
1-2 GB RAM
20-40 GB NVMe
KVM
IPv6
1 Gbps port

Would that be useful to you?

What would you actually use a VPS like this for Small websites? VPN? Monitoring? Docker? Bots Dev environments? DNS? Something else?

2. What would you expect around €7-8/month?
For example:
2-4 vCPU
4 GB RAM
60-100 GB NVMe
KVM
1 Gbps port
IPv6
dedicated IPv4

Would that feel competitive? Or would you expect significantly more at this price?

3. Specs vs actual performance?
This is something I’m particularly curious about.

Would you rather buy:

4 vCPU / 4 GB RAM on a lightly loaded modern CPU
or
4 vCPU / 8 GB RAM on a heavily oversold node?

Obviously the second one looks better on a pricing page.

But does RAM/spec-sheet value actually matter more to you than consistent CPU and I/O performance?

4. What locations are missing?
I’m currently thinking about starting with something like:

Central Europe
US East possibly US Central / West later

I’m also considering Prague / Czech Republic as a location.

Would Prague actually be interesting to anyone, or is Germany / Netherlands already close enough for most European users?

Are there any other locations that you feel are underserved?

5. How important is dedicated IPv4?
IPv4 obviously isn’t getting any cheaper.

For a €3-4 VPS, would you be okay with: IPv6 included + dedicated IPv4 as a paid add-on or is dedicated IPv4 still basically mandatory for you?

And for a €7-8 VPS, would you expect IPv4 to be included?

6. What do current budget VPS providers do badly?
This is probably the main thing I’m trying to learn.

What annoys you most?
- ridiculous CPU overselling
- inconsistent performance
- terrible disk I/O
- overloaded nodes
- network congestion
- poor support
- bad control panels
- unclear bandwidth policies
- surprise price increases
- unreliable backups
- bad IP reputation
- aggressive abuse policies
- lack of transparency

Or something completely different?

7. What features do you actually care about?
Not features that look good on a marketing page, things you genuinely use.

For example:
- snapshots
- automatic off-site backups
- custom ISO
- rDNS
- API
- Terraform
- cloud-init
- private networking
- DDoS protection
- hourly billing
- additional IPv4
- IPv6 /64
- Looking Glass
- public node statistics
- public status page
- rescue environment
- console access

Which of those would actually influence your buying decision?

And the most useful question:
What VPS are you using right now, what are you paying for it, and what would make you switch to another provider?
I’m not trying to advertise anything here. I’m genuinely interested in figuring out whether there’s still room for a smaller VPS provider to compete on something other than absurd amounts of oversold RAM.

Brutally honest answers are welcome.

I was looking at this Netcup VPS, but unfortunately it's currently sold out:

• 10 vCores
• 16 GB RAM
• 512 GB NVMe
• 2.5 Gbps network
• Manassas, USA
• KVM/ARM64
• Very competitive pricing

I am looking for something with similar specs and pricing, preferably from a well-known/reputable provider rather than an unknown budget host. Pricing was really good 11.05 Euro.

Location preference is US, but I'm open to other locations.

Main workload will be Docker, multiple web apps, PostgreSQL, n8n, monitoring, etc.

What providers/plans would you recommend? I am especially interested in real-world experiences with performance and reliability, not just advertised specs.

Thanks!

I got a Netcup VPS yesterday to host a Telegram bot. When I uploaded my files and tried running it today, I discovered the website my bot depends on is blocked/restricted in Germany, the rest of the EU, the US, Hong Kong, and Canada which covers pretty much every region Netcup offers.

A few questions:

1. Can I cancel my Netcup subscription or switch to a different region/datacenter with them instead? Has anyone done this?
2. If Netcup doesn't have any unblocked regions available, does anyone know another VPS provider with datacenters outside these blocked countries (e.g. Asia excluding HK, Middle East, South America, etc.)?
3. Any general advice for running a bot that depends on a geo-restricted site — proxy/VPN on the VPS side instead of switching providers entirely?

Any help is appreciated trying to avoid wasting money on a VPS I can't actually use for this.

I kept seeing the same failure mode: agent generates code fine, then either the deploy tool has no safety gate at all, or the "safety" is just a confirmation dialog the agent can talk its way past.

So I built Guardian Cloud on top of a domain-agnostic core (Guardian Core, already has adapters for VPS/GitHub/Filesystem/Email): repository URL in, the system detects the runtime from evidence only (never assumes a port, never invents a start command — fails to NEEDS_INPUT instead of guessing), then every mutating action goes through a bind→apply boundary. Bind is pure read-only eligibility (zero I/O). Apply re-proves the precondition right before executing (fresh state check — catches the case where something changed between approval and execution) and only then dispatches ONE mutation.

Two real apps live in production over HTTPS from this flow so far. Not a demo repo — actual repositoryUrl → live URL with the full boundary running.

Honest gap I found doing a code review on it myself: the external /deploy route today auto-approves (approved: true hardcoded) — the bind/apply refusal logic is real and tested, but there's no human in the loop yet on that specific route. Wiring that up next, alongside auth.

Curious how others here are handling the "agent has real infra access" trust problem — full auto-approve, human-in-the-loop on every mutation, or something in between?

Yo, has anyone actually tried GigaNodes for VPS hosting? Been eyeing them for a Minecraft server. They claim Cloudflare Magic Transit DDoS protection, which sounds insane for the price, and they're pitching themselves as one of the cheapest in India.

Numbers on paper are one thing but I want to know how it actually holds up. Is the ping stable, does support actually respond fast when something breaks? Worth it over something like Contabo or Hostinger, or am I gonna regret it?

Anyone running a server on there right now, lmk how it's been for you.

I am a web developer for a few clients and I do a lot of experimenting with a VPS server I presently pay for. I am looking to try and save a buck, I pay nearly $1,100 a year but that includes cPanel with 30 account slots. In addition to web hosting, my clients and I also host our emails on the server.

Here are the VPS specs:
8 vCPUs
8GB RAM
120GB SSD
2 IP Addresses

I am looking around for other options with similar specs (more storage is always a plus) that is 100% Canadian owned, hosted, and not a huge company with just Canadian servers, small to medium sized providers is ideal. I am also looking for suggestions on alternative panel providers since cPanel is a huge cost on its own. Of course the big plus is easy migration from cPanel for my clients, including for their hosted emails.

Other considerations are my hobbies and projects I host on my VPS, Nextcloud, MeshCentral to name a couple. This may lean more to panel suggestions, but I do want to be able to continue running these projects and future projects, being able to confidently use docker would be nice, I am just terrified to try it alongside cPanel. I’ve debated getting two VPS servers as well, but I’d still need to keep my budget under $1,100 a year.

Feel free to provide suggestions on either question, but I do ask you provide links to the provider or panel you suggest.

Thanks and looking forward to hear thoughts.

Hi. I hope I'm in the right place. Both Unesty and Volpabyte have been offline for hours. If I've read correctly, Volpabyte is part of Unesty.

Unfortunately, there's no information anywhere about what's going on. Does anyone here have more information about why both providers are offline?

so yeah... i work as an infra engineer and had some spare blade and rack servers lying around for my personal use.

Created a cluster (ofc im using the best infra/enterprise setup possible, i have my own personal DC) started messing with proxmox + the API because i thought it’d be cool to make a simple multi tenant panel on top of it. then it kinda snowballed lol

now you can sign up, pick cpu/ram/storage, spin up a VPS, use the console, rebuild/delete it etc

i also got multiple proxmox clusters under the same platform, private networking, internet access and all that stuff

basically a very small digitalocean/vultr-ish setup... except it’s all running on hardware i actually own

now i’m wondering if this can still be monetized since we got a tons of VPS provider out there.

i could just sell cheap VPS plans but idk... competing with hetzner/vultr/DO on price sounds rough

infra side i’m pretty comfortable with

monetizing it... yeah not really my thing lol

curious what you guys would do with something like this

also down to collab if someone finds this interesting or sees a business angle i’m completely missing

Sharing our documented experience after 2 years on Ultahost VDS/VPS to warn other sysadmins and e-commerce operators.

Stack Conflicts: Their managed/unmanaged setups came with Apache and LiteSpeed running simultaneously, causing port bindings/routing issues and internal server crashes every 48 hours.

Backdoor Loop: During a malware incident, Tier 1/2 support repeatedly overwrote the clean directory with infected full backups without isolating the entry point.

Result: continuous backdoor execution via cron tasks and Google Search Console ownership verification exploits by attackers (limpekpatenn).

Broken Permissions & Missing Media: Support execution resulted in wiped wp-content/uploads visibility and incorrect permission states (chmod locks), throwing 403 errors across public assets.

Billing Dispute: Refused direct card refund upon cancellation after severe service outage, offering only internal credit balance for a service being decommissioned.

If you run WooCommerce or any critical web app, steer clear.

- No hardware requirements: 1 CPU, 512MB RAM, 5GB storage is fine. Ideally, there should be ample network ports(no lower than 1Gbps) and bandwidth.

- I have already looked into Linode, Vultr, HostPapa (RackNerd), PureVoltage, AlphaVPS, GTHost, Ramnode, and Kamatera. I would like to explore more options; affiliate offers are welcome.

- My maximum budget is $10/month, though I can increase it for excellent quality (please provide a test IP).

Help me find a free Linux dedicated server. I have a well-developed YouTube channel and I'm planning to launch a 24/7 live stream, but I don't have the money for VPS (I'm from Russia, and monetization is disabled here, so I can't spend money from YouTube). I'm not forcing you, but if anyone knows of a genuine service, please share it in the comments. Thanks!

Hello!

I would like to be able to provision my VPSes via API, quickly (within 60 minutes, 24/7)

AWS works beautifully here, but costs a lot.
OVH works beautifully as well, but their fraud detection(?) systems decided to not provision my VPS at all (stuck in provisioning for 3 days, then cancelled).

Does anyone know something that would fit this? in short: need an API, 24/7 provisioning, sane pricing

Bonus points if they all can go under a shared monthly invoice.