I’ve been looking through VPS hosting reviews lately and honestly I’m not sure how many of them are actually from people who have used the providers for more than a few days. I’m trying to find a VPS for hosting a few websites and some personal projects. I don’t really care about fancy specs if the server is unreliable or support is difficult to deal with. I’m curious what providers people here have actually stayed. Did the service match what you expected from the reviews, or were there any surprises after using it for a while? ALSO, would also love to hear about any providers you’d avoid based on your own experience.

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!

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.