Where do you get your cheap servers?

There are at least 5 providers that will rent you a $5/month server: DigitalOcean, Lightsail, Linode, UpCloud and Vultr. There's a guy that publishes benchmarks of their $5 instance regularly

https://joshtronic.com/2019/09/02/vps-showdown-digitalocean-...

DigitalOcean is by far the most popular. Personally, I like Vultr because they also have $2.50 IPv6 only instances and you can upload your own ISO file if you want to try a less popular Linux distribution. Both services have similar user interfaces that are pretty good.

That being said, $60/year is still a lot. If you can get away with just a static site, try GitHub pages https://pages.github.com/. You only get one (unless you create GitHub organizations) but it's free. You can still have your own domain pointing to it with TLS (free through Let's Encrypt). You miss out on the fun of managing a Linux server unfortunately.

It's all about the pre-cloud hosting providers.

Check out the Black Hat SEO forums - the people there generally are running all manner of sketchy services, bots, crawlers, etc. that need the cheapest compute available.

The old hosting providers often have deals that can get you more power than the equivalent Amazon machine for the same price. If you're looking to be able to host something that other people might use, this is a solid way to go; just make sure you build something that it's easy for you to re-deploy elsewhere (i.e. at the very least have all your code in a separate revision control system, and some mechanism to back up any databases / locally created files to your home machine).

If you're really just looking for something dirt cheap for personal projects that won't see use beyond yourself, the free / up to $5/mo tier of the big cloud providers is a reasonable thing to check out. https://vncoupon.com/5-usd-vps-compare-linode-vs-vultr-vs-di... is a bit old now, maybe there's a newer article helping you sort that out.

Google cloud free tier gives everyone (not just students) one 'always' free vps instance. It works great for me.

Oracle promised 2 instances but got an error 'out of capacity' error instead. Support staff confirmed they dont have hardware in my region.

Hetzner.

They offer VMs with 1 vCPU and 2GB RAM for 3€/month. Quite a deal.

OVH, Hetzner, and the whole Low End family

https://lowendstock.com/

https://www.lowendtalk.com/

https://lowendbox.com/

But nowadays you can get servers for free. AWS, Google, and even Oracle have free triers:

https://aws.amazon.com/free/

https://cloud.google.com/free/

https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/

Lowendbox, lurk 3+ years offers during blackfriday and you'll pay 1-5 dollars/year for a 2gb ram VPS with unlimited traffic in a non 13-eyes country. Payable in bitcoin.

I use digitalocean.

Not because they are cheap but because they are great. It just so happens they have a $5 / month plan for a 1 CPU core / 1GB of memory / 25GB SSD server.

Heroku is free if you don't need constant uptime (it shuts down your server when it's idle for a while and starts it back up when a request comes in). Then the cheapest paid tier is $7.

It's also really pleasant because you deploy by just pushing your code; no SSHing or cron jobs. You do code an entire server process; you just don't manage it. So it's like halfway-serverless.

The downside, other than being $7 instead of $5, is that that's only for a single process; you can't run multiple low-compute servers within that $7. The file system also gets wiped whenever you deploy, so it's not appropriate for a database.

AWS, azure, and digitalocean all give free credit to students

https://education.github.com/pack

vultr, hetzner, and OVH have sub-$5/month VPS plans

Personally, I use digitalocean.

Vultr: 1 vCPU / 512MB RAM / 500 GB bandwidth for $2.5 a month [0]. I ran a VPN with them, once.

https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud-compute/

For webpages, I have been using https://1mb.site (free custom domain and TLS) and https://netlify.com

Just get a Hetzner. Costs very little, good exercise to set it up with a usable config. I even have one that I barely ever use.

You can find cheaper options than Linode, but honestly you can host lots of stuff on a single $5/month instance, and you get the benefit of their infrastructure and support. I remember being a student and paying $20/month for a SliceHost VPS with a fraction of what you can get today for much less.

OVH, Hetzner, Digital Ocean

Had an account on asmallorange (https://asmallorange.com) for a while. Can't vouch for their compute power, but if barebones shell access is what you're after, they do well.

I'm using scaleway.com. For $3/month you get 2vcpus, 2GB RAM and 20GB ssd.

LowEndTalk offers

Very cheap but don't be surprised if a supplier goes out of business/disappears so strategize accordingly.

Plus then of course all the major cloud provide a intro credit. So that should cover about 3 years worth of basic VPS

Assuming the question is an XY problem and you are really looking for a very simple solution for an Internet server you operate: Have a look at FFTH.

If fiber is offered for your home then you can host your server in your bedroom. This is what I do for my websites, and this is really liberating. Hell, you could serve from a RaspberryPi or if you think this is too extreme, from a mini PC like Gigabyte Brix.

If fiber is not offered, but you plan to relocate anyway, try to optimize for FFTH. This is what I have done, I moved more than a year ago and specifically looked for FTTH.

https://prgmr.com/

I have been using their VPSs for about 10 years: it's one of the best services I've ever had the pleasure to use.

VPS:

- https://bytemark.co.uk (VPS, colo and leased physical by competent & responsive folks (in Manchester IIRC))

- https://linode.com (more than just Linux)

- https://pair.com (24/7 phone support in North America, has FreeBSD offerings too, been in business a long time)

Bonus: And physical servers: https://unixsurplus.com

I have my important VPSs on Linode since 2008, good experience, almost zero downtime in 10+ years, very reliable, great customer support. They have a $5/mo Nanode 1CPU, 1 GB Ram.

I've been on Digital Ocean for a few years, pretty happy with them and have no plans to move on. I was on Hetzner before them, but moved away because the pricing was essentially the same yet Hetzner's control panel (at least back then - I'm talking before 2015) was a bit of a pain, and DO's is all shiny, and I find what I'm looking for quickly, most of the time. Hetzner's admin panel might have come a long way since then though?

Great experience with Amazon Lightsail. The smallest instance is only $3.50 a month, and you can add a swap file if you need a bit more than 512 MB of RAM.

Lightsail is like swimming in the shallow end of the AWS pool. Doesn’t have a drop down with 50 services like AWS, but has enough to run a small or medium sized web app.

There are many options mentioned already and one I haven't seen so far is https://www.ssdnodes.com/ been using it for some time, fares well.

Time4vps has some of the best prices I can find for storage. I've been using one for a could years with no problems.

Virmach seems to have comparable prices, but I haven't used them.

For websites, just use GitHub Pages. It's totally free, very reliable, and extremely easy. It feels like a nerdier GeoCities, but without the composing tools.

If you're looking for really cheap, then use the free servers. Google, AWS provide free tiers that are more than enough for a hobbyist.

Linode. Cheap but not too cheap, still reliable.

Take advantage of student credits!

Even when you run out of credits, all cloud providers have a pretty generous free tier.

For example see haveibeenpwn.com's cost breakdown for running a hugely popular api for less than a dollar a month: https://www.troyhunt.com/serverless-to-the-max-doing-big-thi...

Netcup, very cheap and reliable https://www.netcup.de

I use netcup.eu , a German Provider. They have cheap hour based plans so that you can cancel your plan everytime.

Sounds crazy, but the Orcale free tier might work for you. Enough to run two small Linux VPS instances free.

OVH, their cheapest brand is Kimsufi. From five euros a month. i.e. your own box for the price of a VPN.

Below the cheapest and most reliable VPS providers.

Europe => Hetzner, Scaleway

USA => Digital Ocean, Vultr, Linode

Also check to see what free stuff you can get through your school!

In France: OVH. Their kimsufi lineup is hard to beat.

Hetzner is great. Cheap for what you get.

AWS EC2 reserved instances, pay upfront for 3 years, it works out cheaper than digitalocean/linode.

scaleway.com and hetzner.com

Now, you are asking for subscription-based, but have you considered that it is perfectly possible to host on your own hardware at home perfectly fine for experimental/personal stuff? Just buy the cheapest Raspberry Pi (or a clone or whatever) and hook it up at home, that's certainly going to be cheaper than any of the cloud providers being thrown around here, only the cheapest lowendtalk offers might be cheaper still.

I know you aren't interested in server hardware, but you should be. You can get extremely cheap used servers from eBay, Craigslist, or government auctions, and you can get extremely cheap rackspace in colocation centers.