Hi community, wanted to know your opinions on the various VPS companies offering compute boxes in the cloud. Which one do you use, why, and what do you recommend for someone who has a $15 budget for a decently powerful box(es)?

Thanks!

  • francisco_1844English
    2·
    1 year ago

    Over the years I have used a number of providers. Below is my recollection / mental notes.

    Digital Ocean - They used to be one of my favorite ones until they dropped support for FreeBSD. For the most part they seem stable, their interface is clean and easy to use and they have a good range of offerings.

    Vultr They had a time when they had reliability issues so I moved away from them for some time. Some months ago came back to try them when Digital Ocean dropped their FreeBSD support. So far have had zero issues.

    Lunanode This is a smaller company and they have a, very, limited number of datacenters. Competitive pricing so if you are ok with their data centers you can potentially save some money. However, they also have a smaller number of products available.

    OVH Everything about OVH is confusing. They have multiple sites and depending where you live you are supposed to use one or the other. They also own a number of other brands (companies that they bought and now is just a brand under OVH) which adds to the confusion. IThey have physical machines and VMs. I only use them for physical since I much prefer Vultr or DigitalOcean interfaces for VMs.

    For physical machines one has to be even more careful as you would have to deal with any potential hardware failures. If you have a VM and the host has issues they can just move the VM. If you have a physical machine and it has issues, you will have bigger down time than if you were using VMs unless you have multiple physical machines. The main point of using physical machines at OVH is pricing.

    Just as an example of pricing for OVH… A digitalocean VM with 16GB of RAM and 8 cores is $96. At OVH they currently have an “end of summer” deal with a 8 cores, 2× 2TB HDD SATA, 16GB RAM for $22. Similar setup with SSD instead for about same price. Some of those “deals” are older machines, but depending on your needs that may be ok.

    Arpnetworks More expensive the DigitalOcean and Vultr with simpler interface and limited products… but they have pretty good FreeBSD support so that was an important factor to me, but their higher price may make it not worth for many / most… unless FreeBSD support matters. They also have better support as they are a smaller company. If I recall correctly it is a single data center in California.