At the last meeting, al fresco al Nundah, I was interested in a cheap VPS. Two suggested by @Belfry and @skalyan were binary lane and SSD Nodes.
Both of these seem good options but I wondered if others had other preferences, recommendations and experiences.
TIA.
I have a history with Digital Ocean, they have a Sydney node and their basic VPS is about the same as Binary Lane but costs $6.00 AUD a month plus GST. They are a really professional org with every conceivable option.
As you mentioned in your post, I’m very happy with Binary Lane. Just logged on to check my VPS and it’s been running for 218 days (It’s been set up for far longer than that, so that should really read: I last did something stupid and broke something really badly 218 days ago), and has generally been forgotten about for that time. It’s been chugging away, doing unattended-upgrades and updating the specific software I’m running on it automatically too, so I’ve not had to touch it nor experienced any downtime beyond when I’ve been messing around with it and have broken something. Reliability is the biggest criteria for me, and their offering is pretty hard to beat for $4.13 a month. The other thing that is hard to beat is a Brisbane location. My specific use case requires low latency connections to nodes in Brisbane and regional Queensland. I’m 7-9ms from this VPS and <= 6 hops from the VPS at its furtherest distance, “networkically” speaking. It’s been happily chugging away in the background with zero downtime for 7+ months since I last even looked at it.
I can also recommend Ransom IT as being excellent. I’ve not used them for 5-6 years, and only stopped using them because I didn’t have a need for a VPS at that time, and not because there was any specific issue I had with them. They are also a very reliable smaller provider.
As far as the big end of town go and for homelab use it’s probably also worth mentioning Oracle Cloud. Their Always Free Tier is quite generous allowing for a few completely free Ampere ARM and AMD x86-64 VMs. Again, I haven’t used it in ~5 years but there were free VPSes available in their Sydney location at the time, and it looks as if Melbourne has been added since. When I signed up a credit card was required, but their management panel makes it explicitly clear what’s free and what isn’t. I was never billed, that credit card is long gone, and it’s not come up as an issue since. I’ve seen several anecdotal bits and pieces online about people having their free VMs killed off with no notice and no recourse, but I have not experienced this myself, nor do I know if there were other undisclosed reasons for this happening or even whether there is any truth to these posts. Can’t beat the price, but caveat emptor applies (in addition to “if you’re not paying for it, then you’re the product”). My use case was messing about and testing a few things on ARM based VMs, as well as playing with Oracle Autonomous Linux so I’ve not used any of their VM offerings long term. Given that their cloud platform is very feature rich their management panel is also significantly more complex than smaller VPS-only providers, but not so much that it’s not possible to navigate and their documentation is excellent.
For the sake of completeness, I’ll also mention Google Cloud Free Tier’s Compute Engine (i.e., VMs) located in the USA, but that they charge for data transfer to Australia, so it may not suit anyone here at all. Haven’t done the maths as to whether the “free” VM but paying for data is worth it.
I suppose it depends on what your use case is, @zeeclor, and whether you need something low latency, something with a lot of resources available, something where you can learn about the features and experiment with a larger cloud platform’s offerings, or some other use case.
I’ve heard very good things about DigitalOcean, Linode, and Vultr as well so I’m curious to hear from others about their experience if they’ve tried any of those providers.
Thanks @Belfry, my use case is to have a small throw away VPS to experiment on some “in cloud” services.
Cheap is good. I have used DigitalOcean, Linode and Vultr in the past and have no complaints about any of these mid tier providers. I am currently on Hetzner since they have an excellent service, a great interface and aren’t American. All the ones I have tried are equally competitive on price.
I will go with binary lane’s $7.50 per month 2GB option. I’ll just be running docker. Sometimes you need more memory to install some apps than to run them. Adding a swap file has helped me in this circumstance in the past so 2 GB should be sufficient. (Cloud images do not have swap files by default.)
My main aim with this is try to get a mail server to talk to Microsoft accounts. Currently HLB cannot reach Outlook, Live and Hotmail accounts due to Microsoft’s aggressive spam filtering. This is despite our using Mailgun for sending email.
It must be a known problem since Mailgun recently invited me to a webinar specifically on this topic.
Just another reason to love Microsoft.
Webinar
Authentication and Microsoft’s Sender Requirements
Off topic, but could this be a DKIM issue either with the discourse. or parent domains? I see SPF and DMARC are set up, but I think Microsoft are fussy about DKIM in particular. Happy to talk about it more offline, if you’d like.
