Ask Slashdot: Best Inexpensive VPS Provider?

David Greene writes "After many years of waiting for my provider to upgrade DSL service from the measly 1.5 Mbps I have now, I've decided to go another route. Unfortunately, no other provider in the area (Twin Cities) offers static IPs and permission to run servers. I am looking for a VPS solution to host the public parts of my personal site. What can the Slashdot community recommend as a good, inexpensive VPS provider for personal use? This will mainly be hosting a blog and a couple of Free Software projects (wikis, git repositories, etc.). I would prefer something with KVM so I can manage my own OS install but I am open to other options. Root shell access is essential."

Comments

FDC Servers

[InterestingFella]

I can't but recommend FDC servers. I've used them off and on since 2008. I've also tried many others but there's always been something wrong with them. Never had problems with FDC tho. They also give unlimited bandwidth so you don't need to worry about extra costs, and they have three datacenters. Two in US (Chicago and Denver) and one in EU (Czech). Servers are also quickly set up. They're an established company too. I've had a few porn sites hosted there, and anyone in the industry knows how demanding those can be on hardware and bandwidth. Never had any problems with FDC tho. Their VPS plans start at $9/month which is hard to beat. Even shitty providers have higher price.

I would avoid any unknown company. While there most likely are many good ones that are less known, it's a hit or miss. Sometimes they just close, either because it was unprofitable for them or just for no reason. There's many VPS providers who are just run by some guy, who leases the servers from DC's. So go with established company that has their own datacenters and years of experience. You save lots of headache.

Re:FDC Servers

[SomePgmr]

I'll have to check that one out... I'm always on the lookout.

I used to use Slicehost, but they haven't really improved anything in years and they were not staying competitive on pricing. I've been migrating everything over to Linode, which I really like.

Those both have the usual local console feature, in case something goes wrong.

Re:FDC Servers

[InterestingFella]

Stop spamming your referral code. HostGator is awful. You're only promoting it because when people use that nosopa25percent code you get paid like $50.

Re:FDC Servers

[InterestingFella]

Btw, if you really want to sign up with HostGator, then see their blog. They offer 50% off with the official NOSOPA promo code, not 25% what this joker Shikaku is spamming with his own referral code.

Re:FDC Servers

[PCM2]

HostGator is awful.

Just out of curiosity, what is so "awful" about it? I use Hostgator and it's always been fine for me -- certainly much better than the last couple of hosting providers I used. Customer service is competent and they've always resolved my issues quickly. I have shell access. All the quotas are essentially unlimited. It's cheap. What's not to like?

Re:FDC Servers

[Thesis]

I had a machine colocated at FDC in Chicago, at CBOT, for two years. Here is my take on their service from my personal experience. The service was cheap, and attractive to me at the time, for I was just getting my feet wet in colocating. I found the bandwidth at that time (2006-08) was terrible in consistency, and oversold. I guess what I am really trying to say is their network went down quicker, and more frequently, than a cheap street walker. When the network was up (as in their equipment not letting out the magic smoke, or maintenance degrading the service temporarily for upgrades), the DDOS attacks on the network were crippling and frequent. I found out quickly through other customers there, that it was a haven for botnets, and IRC servers, which were always at war with each other or someone else. As far as physical support to a machine (needing a reboot, help diagnose an issue such as bad network card/cable) the service was always prompt, and bang on. Due to the constant network issues though, I moved my box to Texas in late 2008 to a different provider, and I am much happier.

Things may have changed there since I have used them, but I do not know. They were in the middle of additional network and bandwidth upgrades when I left. Perhaps it is better now, I really do not know. I have read that they currently do not have a SLA (Service Level Agreement). Granted, you are looking for a VPS rather than colocation, but I felt it best to give you my experience from when I was a customer, for the network & bandwidth availability are important no matter where you are. I also suggest reading all the different opinions folks will post here, then research the options you are interested in. WebHostingTalk http://www.webhostingtalk.com/ is another useful tool for you in your research of a provider before making a final decision IMHO.

Re:FDC Servers

[glitch0]

They oversell like crazy. A friend of mine used to work for them. Seriously, they put 8,000 sites on a single server. hostnine.com is just as bad and also greatly oversells their servers as well. It's funny though, if you go in live chat and ask "how many other sites will be on my server with me?" they'll always say "oh less than 100" which is completely false.

This is only true of their shared hosting service though. I can't speak for their VPS service. Also their founder Brent Oxley is a giant douche.

Re:FDC Servers

[glitch0]

Yeah they give you Unlimited* bandwidth, which is very different from truly unlimited bandwidth.

The asterisk means that they can suspend your account whenever they want for using too much bandwidth. It's so funny to never see the word unlimited without the asterisk in the hosting world.

Re:FDC Servers

[causality]

50% off the first month or 25% off the entire order is your choice. And that what is to say that you're not spamming your own referral code when they both are nosopa?

The point is, if you had one shred of integrity you would have clearly stated up-front that you derive a monetary benefit from someone using the code that you supplied. Then the readers can decide on their own whether this makes your advice biased and unworthy of consideration. Being aware of that, you "conveniently" omitted that part.

Such an omission had to have been intentional. It is a lie by omission and that makes you a liar.

Re:FDC Servers

[Tyler Eaves]

Observation bias? After all, the sites that are up, you don't know who hosts them...

Re:FDC Servers

[brantondaveperson]

Since you're not offering them unlimited cash you can kind of see their point of view.

Re:FDC Servers

[kyrio]

You should be ashamed of yourself for giving out bad advice.

Do NOT use FDC Servers. They are horrible. They are totally incompetent when it comes to keeping your VPS running. Your node will always be down and they will NOT notify you. Their staff is full of imbeciles. You will have to wait hours, if not days, for your server to come back up. They will have network connectivity issues for weeks and will not inform anyone. I don't think they even have a service outage/info page because it would be full of new updates of outages every day.

The below providers are blacklisted, especially since most of them are incompetent resellers of another provider and their billing software license is expired (either that or they are super extremely incompetent). You will not get a refund from these fools after you realize that you can't access your servers for no reason other than their links are broken because they are idiots. Of course, because their billing software is broken, or they are so totally useless as humans, if you pay with PayPal you will be able to put in a dispute and the idiots won't even reply. Probably because their mail servers are broken, or maybe they lost their passwords and are too stupid to figure out how to reset them.

DO NOT USE THESE PROVIDERS:
ChimeHost
ServerAxis
FDCServers
Profuse Solutions brands

There are more that I went through, but I can't remember them all.

Re:FDC Servers

[Anonymous Coward]

Idiotic. Asking for recommendations and warnings in a section meant specifically for that is one way you "shop around". Nobody has all the answers and asking for input from a somewhat-targeted crowd like /. isn't lazy hand-holding. It's a modicum of diligence. Furthermore, you have no reason to assume this forum is the only source of information the op is using in comparisons.

And I'm not sure where the government conspiracy / public school rant fits in, but that sounds like a personal issue you should probably see to, posthaste. That kind of angry, judgmental paranoia isn't healthy.

Re:FDC Servers

[kyrio]

He's not interested in who has their sites up, because they all should. He's interested in who is going to keep them up.

If every site that he's encountered as being "suspended" was using HostGator, that means he can't trust them to keep a site up. If he had seen other hosts with the same problem, especially if there were as many from other hosts, he wouldn't have found HostGator's suspended sites as peculiar.

Linode

[Anonymous Coward]

Been very happy with Linode and PV-GRUB (PV-GRUB allows Xen guests to boot their own custom kernel)

http://www.linode.com/
http://www.linode.com/wiki/index.php/PV-GRUB

for 20$ per month
RAM 512MB
Storage 20GB
Transfer 200GB

Re:linode

[wik]

And yet another plug for Linode. I have been with them for over four years. Their infrastructure staff knows what they're doing (tech support has responded in 3 minutes on a Sunday night!) and they're hands-off with respect to how you want to run your box. Disk space is a little expensive, but it's not oversubscribed. Even the smallest accounts are well worth the money.

Re:Linode

[smed]

I too have been very happy with Linode.
Currently I manage about a dozen Linodes for various clients and the performance and support have exceeded my expectations by a long-shot.
On occasion when there was a minor problem, Linode support staff contacted me quickly with instructions and pointers to documentation for handling the issues.
Performance is much better than what you might expect by using the memory/disk-space metrics for each server plan.
Linode support is excellent. The Linode Library has the best documentation, they have how-to docs for most common projects and they are updated regularly and the commentary is also very helpful. And dont forget the forums - if you're having an issue or need to figure out how to do something - most likely someone has written about it in the forums. You can extract some very valuable information for troubleshooting and project planning in the forums.
And last but not least - the IRC channel is staffed by Linode support personnel and lots of really helpful volunteers. The community is awesome and friendly and helpful to-boot.
Linode's got my vote and my continued business.

linode

[Aighearach]

linode is by far the best, it is not even close.

They don't over-sell (far from it!), the service is great, uptime is nearly perfect, excellent tools like remote shell over https.

linode

[Maglos]

I tried a cheap $5/month vps for a while, it was trouble. First they falsely claimed that I was maxing out my transfer limit and I switched to linode after a bunch of os files became corrupted. I haven't had an issue with linode and a few of my friends use them. Also 128mb a bit inconvenient for most things(watch out for orphaned ssh sessions chewing up ram at 5mb each).

Comcast Business Class

[dburkland]

For $59 a month I get Comcast's Business Class service (12 down/2up) along with 5 static IPs which I use to host things like mail off a personal server. I've been using their service for almost 3 years now without much issue (the support also is a lot better which is worth it in case you do run into any hiccups). I'm in the Twin Cities area and am pretty sure this service is available to much of the metro area so you may want to give them a call.

Try IntoVPS - using them for over a year

[Anonymous Coward]

Try IntoVPS (www.intovps.com) - it goes as cheap as 10$ / month for unmanaged VPS (yes, you have root access).

Linode.com

[jeffbeadles]

I've had a vm at Linode for several years now, and couldn't be happier.

Full root access with oob-console access, choice of distros, and the ability to do anything legal that you want.

  -Jeff

Cheap can also mean insecure!

[DaHat]

Recently I discovered that a low cost (semi well known) Shared host I use actually stores passwords (ie login to portal, sql, etc) in a form which can be easily converted to clear text... hell, they even have multiple Show Password links and require you to share said password with them to receive tech support... so they can verify it against the clear text password they see.

I've since been on the hunt for a new host... however have discovered that the treatment of passwords in this manor is not uncommon. Hell, last night I canceled a VPS account less than an hour after signing up as I discovered that not only does the admin exhibit editorial control over passwords (he changed my initial one), but that he too stores them in clear text.

Granted... if you are smart you will use a different password per account/service... however when such a company treats accounts in such a way I can do nothing but run.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

KickAss VPS

[zraider]

I'm in the Twin Cities too. Check out KickAss VPS. They're served out of the Verispace colo center in Edina. I pay $25/month for an Ubuntu server with root access. Never had any problems.

Serveraxis

[Huogo]

I've been with ServerAxis since November 2006 and they have been rock solid. Currently, for my very small hosting needs, I'm paying $9/mo for 512 MB RAM and a 16 GB SSD HD with 500 GB/month bandwidth. Full root access is included, but you have to install the OS off of one of their base images, with the options being CentOS, Debian, Gentoo and Ubuntu.

Try RimuHosting

[freman]

I'm not currently a customer, but I've watched them for a while (friends with one of their staff, full disclosure) and will be going to them when I need to move off my DSL.

Not the cheapest but they do offer a discount for open source developers

http://rimuhosting.com/order/startorder1.jsp

I'm not even getting a discount to plug them ;)

You're not making sense

[suso]

"good, inexpensive"

Those are two parts of the triangle. If you also want it to have it fast, then you're simply being unreasonable. You're probably also one of the people complaining about GoDaddy supporting SOPA. Don't you see that these are all related? Find a hosting provider that knows what they are doing, reliable and pay a little more for it. Don't complain when your server costs more than your dinner.

Dreamhost

[ender-]

I haven't used their VPS but you can look into Dreamhost. I've been very happy with my shared web account.

For what it's worth, I used to think I needed a VPS as well. Then I found myself with limited funds for awhile so I transferred my site to Dreamhost on their shared hosting plan. At the time they had a deal that it was around $48 to pre-pay for 2 years. It averages out to about $1.95/month. In addition to the unlimited domains/disk/bandwidth and mysql database, the account comes with 1 free domain registration, easy setup to have email hosted either through Dreamhost themselves or through Google Apps [which I do]. And it comes with a shell account, which is on the webserver itself running Debian. They have all kinds of one-click installs for various blogs and ecommerce options and whatnot.
As for stuff like git, I'm not sure. I see that there are some git commands on the server, but I don't know if it's possible to run a git server.

At first I thought I would hate it, and would be transferring back to a VPS/Dedicated server first chance I got. Well, it's been 2.5 years now and I have no desire to switch back. I haven't really missed having root access, and it's nice not to have to worry so much about managing everything. Admittedly, this is just personal sites of fairly low importance, but I've been happy with the setup so far. And they don't seem to mind me sitting on irssi on the shell account all day. The only thing it does is it will automatically kill any single process which has been running for a week.

Anyway, it's worth a look and if you don't like it, I think they have a relatively painless process to transfer to a VPS.

As an added bonus, they've been against SOPA since November, according to their official blog.

You're asking in the wrong place

[afabbro]

You should be asking on WHT, which is the best-known forum for discussing web hosting, VPS, and dedicated servers.

I would echo the linode suggestion, particularly if it's the first VPS you've ever used. However, they are not KVM. If you want KVM, try 6sync. Another fine choice is BuyVM, though you have to wait until they have stock, which is a minor media event.

I would ignore the suggestions to look at lowendbox, unless you are willing to trade price for stability (which is not always a bad tradeoff, just be sure to do it consciously)

Danger, Will Robinson

[Zocalo]

I guess you don't use them for outbound email since FDC Servers has a terrible reputation for hosting spammers and having a completely non-responsive abuse department. There are more than a few members of anti-spam lists that advocate a block on sight policy for SMTP as far as FDC are concerned, and I know some that kill them for web as well due to hosted malware.

Of course, that may or may not be an issue for a given individual since it depends on what you want the server for, but I'd strongly recommend a few search queries for "$provider" in connection with "abuse", "spam" and "malware", etc. If they have an entry on Spamhaus, or lots of IPs listed in DNSBLs or URIBLs, then that's generally a bad sign too.

Prgmr.com

[nido]

Prgmr.com owner Luke Crawford has some diary entries at k5 where he talks about his business...

I've been happy customer of his for the past 2 years, so this comment is a vote for Luke.

Colocation is expensive, don't expect much....

[bleomycin]

The problem with all of these cheap VPS providers is that they almost all operate out of some of the worst data centers in the country. I don't mean to pick on linode in particular but last i checked their west coast facility was hurricane electric, fremont 2. That facility is single homed and known for being just about the cheapest colocation money can buy anywhere on the planet. If you're curious about some of the issues HE FM2 experiences take a look at this thread: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1058700 As you move up the ranks in facilities the costs rise dramatically, "cheap" VPS's are a huge DDOS risk as people purchase them for all sorts of nefarious reasons, so unless they operate their own networks the high end data centers won't touch them with a 10' pole. If http://asn.cymru.com/cgi-bin/whois.cgi and check who they use for transport via robtex: http://www.robtex.com/ The easiest rule to follow: if hurricane electric or cogent are in the mix run and don't look back!

Webkeepers

[fnj]

I can't believe nobody has mentioned http://webkeepers.com/. You can get in for as little as $6.95 a month, and for $19.95 a month you get an unmatched 250GB of disk and 1GB of guaranteed RAM. They have been excellent for me.

Re:Slicehost?

[Guspaz]

Slicehost doesn't exist anymore; Rackspace bought them, let the service languish without improvements (while competitors continued to improve), and then killed it off by forcing customers to migrate to Rackspace's way more expensive services.

My understanding is that many Slicehost customers migrated to Linode, since it was always the closest competitor anyhow.

Amazon have a cheap server

[Ragnar79]

$9 pr month for a Micro server if you reserve it for 1 year.

Micro Instance 613 MB of memory, up to 2 ECUs (for short periodic bursts), EBS storage only, 32-bit or 64-bit platform
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing

Amazon: The elephant in the room.

[cskrat]

Amazon micro EC2 instances are reasonably priced and I use one for my personal sandbox and mail server. Average price is $14.60 /month ($0.02/h * 24h * 365d / 12) for a no commitment a la carte and drops to an average of $8.82/mo or $6.43/mo with 1 or 3 year reservations https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing . They also have a free for the first year program at http://aws.amazon.com/free/ to get you started.

You won't get KVM access for OS install but there are startup images for all the common free linux distros (Centos, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, etc.), Amazon Linux (a custom distro for EC2), and non-free OS's like RHEL and MS Windows (they cost more per hour). Every distro I've used on there gives you either direct root login or `sudo su -l` capability. You have full control over the incoming firewall rules so you can allow specific ports by IP or CIDR range without chewing up CPU or I/O in iptables. You can add additional storage on the fly (including via automated script within your VPS if you can program) and take live snapshots of running disks (including the OS disk) for backups.

I use Amazon for my work systems and much prefer them to managing an on site rack or letting some other host charge us for the impediment to administration that is managed hosting.

Re:Amazon: The elephant in the room.

[cskrat]

I actually factored the heavy use (i.e. on 24/7) reservations of $62 and $100 for my reserved prices. The actual monthly fee is about $3.65 after you've committed to (i.e. paid for) a heavy use reservation. That's part of why I put the word "average" in front of those prices.

Re:lowendbox.com

[mitgib]

Here you go champ, lowendbox.com

This is the best advise we'll see for a low cost VPS, as well as the discussion on http://lowendtalk.com/ This pair of sites is devoted to VPS priced $7 per month or less, and filled with mostly candid answers by actual users. Some of the popular, and regarded better KVM providers you will find on these sites are

buyvm.net
tinykvm.net
ramhost.us
hostigation.com
bitcable.com

* Disclaimer - I am the owner of hostigation.com

Re:I live in the Twin Cities and can run servers

[garcia]

Well, Comcast is way faster than that. What are you waiting for?

Linode

[DRichardHipp]

I've been running http://www.sqlite.org/ on Linode since 2004. They've been great. Highly recommended.

Re:Linode FTW

[SIGBUS]

One thing to note, though, is that Linode will sometimes hand out extras - and if it's disk space or RAM, you'll need to reboot to take advantage of it. :)

Re:lowendbox.com

[gregthebunny]

A great host I found on lowendbox was RAM Host. I got a 128 MB/10 GB VPS for $15/year. That's per YEAR!

Re:ARP Networks

[thatkid_2002]

I'm with ARP too. They're excellent. The offering is good and the service is great. I'm not changing any time soon as I've already tried Linode,VPSLink and a couple of others. A big reason for going with ARP is if you care about IPv6, good network (peers, and good APAC service). You have complete control over your OS as they run KVM virtualisation.

The IRC channel is great too and you can chat with the guys who run the servers and some pretty knowledgeable customers. There's a few names in the IRC you may recognise too. The only downside I can see is that their provisioning process is definitely handled manually instead of a fully automated system that can pop out a new VPS in 30 seconds - so if you're used to that you may be annoyed. It's not that slow, and if you're in the USA you're in the right timezone at least.

I'm running 768 MB, 20 GB, 400 GB USD $20/month and I've been with them about a year and a half.

A site you may want to browse is http://www.lowendbox.com/ as they get some good deals from satisfactory providers.

i moved to host chopper, never looked back

[decora]

after trying FDC, Slicehost, Swvps, & Linode, i finally found a hosting solution that had everything I needed for a good price.

http://hostchopper.com/

Re:i moved to host chopper, never looked back

[KazW]

after trying FDC, Slicehost, Swvps, & Linode, i finally found a hosting solution that had everything I needed for a good price.

http://hostchopper.com/

A publicly posted support ticket they show one their site:

HOLY SHIT... COULD YOUR ENGLISH BE ANY MORE BROKEN? IT REMINDS ME OF A VENTRILOQUIST'S DUMMY AFTER FALLING DOWN ABOUT 12 FLIGHTS OF STAIRS AND THEN BEING CRUSHED IN THE ASS-END OF A GARBAGE TRUCK! YOU COULD USE A PASSROD WHERE THE SUN DON'T SHINE! I'LL HAVE TANGO CONTACT YOU, HE'S INTO SODOMY AND OTHER KINKY SHIT. -NOVEMBER CHIEF EXECUTIVE WIZARD SERIOUS MASTURBATOR HOSTCHOPPER.COM

"Server: wizardfucker.hostchopper.com"

Charlie Sheen started a hosting company?

This hosting company is a good joke, I have mod points but couldn't mod you 'funny' since I wanted to post this, too bad.

P.S. All kidding aside, anyone willing to pay this "company" for services of any type would be brain dead.

Re:Hetzner

[Quazion]

Yeah! Hetzner is great. You can cancel the contract per month. So just try it for a month for 8 euro and if you dont like cancel it.

I have been using for about a year now. Its stable,fast and has a very easy webinterface for reinstalling your OS if needed.