A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Hetzner. I've been using both, Hetzner has leaps and bounds better support and no-bullshit approach to customers.
You can find some cheap-ish options on their Server Auction but keep in mind that you should expect the disks to fail sooner than in a new machine. I found that not to be a big issue — use RAID1 and ask them to replace any failing drive, and eventually you get a cheap server with fresh new drives, without any data loss.
How is the latency with Hetzner? my OVH server has some incredibly low latency even though it is in a different country.
EDIT: Even on the auction the prices are still a lot higher than OVH, does anything lower spec ever come up on the auction? And I would use RAID anyway, probably backup the server back to my PC as well.
Hetzner offers some speedtests if that helps: http://speed.hetzner.de/ http://hel1-speed.hetzner.com/ http://fsn.icmp.hetzner.com/
I'm sure whatever hetzners speed is will be miles better than OVH either way, I was more thinking about ping times. My OVH server in france has a ping of 4ms to london which is pretty good. And the better one I was looking at is actually in london.
Really the choice for me will come down to price, Ignoring support and internet speed, I seem to get basically the same server for £26/month with OVH and about £50 with hetzner. this is just a hobby for me and £24 per month more is quite a bit more money.
Are you talking about dedi or vps? Lowest dedi on OVH seems to be an E3-1245 with 2TB HDD 32GB RAM for 47 EUR. Choosing SSD (240GB) adds another 12 EUR. Lowest on Hetzner - at the moment - is an E3-1275 with 64GB and 512GB NVMe for 37 EUR. Plus the Hetzner has GBit, while OVH is on 250MBit.
Have to check OVH VPS though.
You can always start with the Oracle always free tier if you're ok with a bit less than you are looking at.
Not really sure how they offer all this for free tbh
wtf i was thinking you were kidding, a vps with 24gb ram for free??
The huge downside it's that it's from Oracle, but at that price...
I think they hope someone misconfigures their VM and BOOM, huge bill incoming!
Not exactly. The always free tier just cuts you off if you try to go over your limits. It won't let you allocate stuff that it doesn't allow. I don't really understand how they can offer so much for free, but my consensus has mostly been "It's arm, and they probably spy a bit". Which some people are alright with, some people aren't. You can technically strip the OCI Agent from your VPS if you care about that second bit.
Looks good, but I'd rather pay for a server that use oracle. Seems a little too good for free. Especially for Oracle. The satellite image processing I want to do already has some trouble with my 48gb of ram so 24 might not work. Also I wanted to use the storage for an offsite backup. Thanks for the suggestion though!
What do you need it for? Using just HDD this server will be kinda slow. If this is just about storage, I'd recommend getting a good VPS from Hetzner, Netcup or php-friends and extend storage using a Hetzner Storage Box. 1TB for just 3,xx EUR or 5TB for around 12 EUR.
As a benefit you'll not have to deal with failing drives and you do easy backups using snapshots.
undefined> Hetzner Storage Box
How is the speed of the storage box? How do you connect to your VPS? Samba?
I am using cifs. There may be some ups and downs, depending on decryption, filesize and stuff, but in general I can pretty much use the full Gbit connection. The lowest transfer I can remember was 58 or 59 MB/s when I transfered a lot of small files.
Thanks!
I second this! I have been with Hetzner for a couple of years now, pretty happy overall. You could get a decent setup for around 20-25 EUR/m. For 25 you could get a 5TB storage box with a 4core/8GB/160GB SSD VPS, which, IMHO is a decent deal.
As for latency, which I saw you asked about, I have a VPS in their Falkenstein DC and I get 35-40ms from Greece (on a Gigabit FTTH, normalised for LAN latency)
I've just checked and the lowest price is € 38,91, or am I in the wrong section?
Yes, you're in the wrong section. You are looking at dedicated servers, and they are talking about VPS'. You can find them at https://www.hetzner.com/cloud, /u/Mallias was speaking about the CPX31 (under "Shared vCPU (x86)")
I would recommend storing pict-rs images and db backups on B2, much cheaper at only $5/TB.
Pict-rs has configuration options for using B2, and you cna use a script or a Kubernetes operator to automate backups to B2.
Edit: nvm, it appears that storage boxes are cheaper. Not sure how they're managing to do that.
Ive bin using oneprovider (Frans /Amsterdam) for a while now. They somtimes got some decent dedi server for like any where between 10/16 euros a month (1tb HD. 4gig ram is usely like 10to12 euro month . Kinda depends on what you want. But they are nice servers space wise.
Pure self hosting is having a server in your premises. But you can still rent one and still have plenty of control over your computing.
I host some stuff at home but my internet is a bit slow, Also frequent power outages.
Better than a reddit account though
I'm usually happy with the trade-off for better reliability and speed if it's not anything where I want absolute privacy or control.
The privacy is going to be somewhat okay because you're paying them for it, it's supposed to be your machine and analysing all of the different content and traffic people host is much more difficult versus when a company provides one app. Plus it would be a PR and legal disaster. They're probably not going to be passing on how I use my server to advertisers... probably, I hope.
So yeah, the only way I can be certain is to purely run it in my home.
I use Auction server from Hetzner and it's amazing + you have 1 GBps connection in most of them :)
Jesus, on the higher end the value gets absurd. 128Gb of RAM with 2x8Tb hdds for €52.44 a month. Shame the lower end servers aren't quite so good value. Maybe I should just find some more money