My State of Serving, aka VPS recap


So I wrote a bunch about VPSes a few months ago, and what I thought my future looked like with them. Well, a bunch has changed since then, and will going forward, so let’s go:

Full out cloud hosting

Still good for buy-as-you-need systems, still not right for my usecase. Other than reading about price drops in The Register/on Twitter, I’ll be passing over them.

Cloudy VPSes

Haven’t seen too much movement on this. I’m going to lump RamNode (www.ramnode.com) into the Cloudy VPSes section, simply because they’re at 5 locations. Sheer scale. Also, their prices are approaching Digital Ocean level. I’d still go with DO though – The cheaper plans are OpenVZ based, not KVM as DO is.

Traditional VPSes

This is probably the most significant change – instead of migrating to a Digital Ocean droplet/Vultr node, I decided to go with Crissic.

I haven’t actually had my VPS with them go down over ~1 year (yet), and the weird SSH issues resolved themselves around December, so I decided to bite the bullet and extend my existing VPS plan with them. (Or should I say him – all the support tickets have been signed Skylar, so it’s looking like a one man operation.) Crissic is consistently coming in the top 5 in the LowEndTalk forum provider poll so that was additional validation.

With Nginx/PHP-FPM/MariaDB all going, I’m hovering around 300MB of RAM used. So I have a bunch of headroom, which is good.

I also picked up a bunch of NAT-ed VPSes – MegaVZ is offering 5 512MB nodes spread around the world for 20€. So I got them as OpenVPN endpoints. They’re likely going to be pressed into service as build nodes for a bunch of projects (moving Jenkins off my Crissic VPS), but those plans are still up in the air. We shall see…

Dedicated Server?

The most interesting thing I found was Server Bidding. Hetzner (massive German DC company) auctions off servers that were setup for people, but have since cancelled their service. Admittedly, most of their cheaper stuff is consumer grade (i7 instead of Xeons), but I can’t really complain. There’s an i7-3770 with 32GB of RAM and 2x 3TB drives going for € 30.25/USD$34 right now. And prices only go down over time (until someone takes it).

That mix of price/specs is pretty much unmatchable. KVM servers are ~$7/month for a 1GB (and roughly scale linearly), so I’d be looking at $28/month for 4GB of RAM if I were to go normal routes. And that’s totally ignoring the 2x3TB HDD (admittedly, I’d want these in RAID 1, so effectively 3TB only.)

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