Where to get cheap VPS with big storage?

LowEndBox (the go-to site for bargain-bin deals on VPSs) has a page dedicated to preferred high-storage vendors: https://lowendbox.com/tag/highstorage/

I use LetBox for some projects and have been happy with them. Their high-storage plans go up to 10TB disk at $48.30/mo. In my experience their disk performance isn't stellar, but for lots of use cases it's more than adequate. Note that LetBox explicitly disallows media piracy on their servers (not your use case, but that's the context in which a lot of folks seek out high-storage servers). https://my.letbox.com/cart.php?a=confproduct&i=2

There's also WalkerServers. They rent out bare metal servers by the month, going up to 144TB at €255/mo. Their plans are more expensive than LetBox, but you should get better performance since it's bare metal, and if you buy your server in the Leaseweb datacenter, torrenting is allowed. The owner conducts a lot of customer service on Reddit and people seem pleased with his services.

Finally, for your specific use case, I would suggest considering AWS S3, Backblaze B2, or similar. Local disk space could easily be a limitation for folks looking to self-host image space; I have a friend with multiple TiB of images in Google Photos he's looking to move somewhere else. I have 30GiB of photos, which rules out lots of cheap VPS plans. Lots of folks also won't spring for more than the cheapest VPS plan they can get, or they'll load up your software on an old computer with modest storage. Local storage also makes your users responsible for backups/disk failures for some of the most important data they own, and most users really don't implement backup well. Putting the photos into a highly-durable, infinitely-scalable, cost-effective object store with push-button backup/versioning settings carries a lot of advantages for this sort of project. It doesn't have to be either/or -- you could support both -- but I definitely suggest supporting object stores.

As many have said, LowEndBox is a great resource. However it's not as updated as frequently as it used to be. The forums however are still very active: https://www.lowendtalk.com/

https://www.serverhunter.com/ is a solid site for searching for providers, much easier than using LEB.

BuyVM https://buyvm.net/ are my go to provider. Been using them for years and they are probably one of (if not the highest) ranked providers on LEB/LET. The recently upgraded all their nodes to Ryzen 3900X's and NVME SSD's.

Their block storage is stupid cheap at like $5 per 1tb - https://buyvm.net/block-storage-slabs/

Lowest I've seen is https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/sx62 at 1.6€ / TB / month. Anyone seen lower ?

You should be extra careful on big servers with little bandwidth, you might need a month to fill/empty/rebalance them.

How will you host the images ? Metadata will become a bottleneck before hdd size.

Check out https://github.com/chrislusf/seaweedfs

If you need near-line storage, consider using AWS S3, Backblaze's B2 or DigitalOcean's Spaces. All of these will require some kind of transaction time to do things with the files (we're talking milliseconds to a couple of seconds).

If you need on-line storage, such as for a database, then consider AWS with a big EBS volume or Digital Ocean's Volume Block Store.

All of these can be used with the smallest/cheapest VPS instance types... so you can pay $2/month for a micro-sized EC2 reserved instance and attach a lot of storage. A downside to this is that most providers top out at 16TB, which might be a scaling problem depending on what your business is. Even small image hosts are in the multi-petabyte range.

I had not looked at VPS solutions in a while but in the US it looked to me like the majority are just reselling servers from a handful of data center operators - some sort of affiliate marketing setup. When you start comparing ip ranges and DC locations you see a pattern. Anyone else noticed this?

For cheap HDD storage I still haven’t found better than Scaleway Dedibox SATA offers : https://www.scaleway.com/en/dedibox/start/start-2-s-sata/

You really should be looking at good old fashion Dedicated Metal if you really want low pricing.

OVH, Hetzner or ScaleWay. Apart from Hetzner they other two also offer VPS as well.

I'd use Hetzner's Storage Box [1] for storage shared by their 3-core 4GB VPSes [2] for compute. The compute nodes themselves have higher local storage compared to most other popular VPS services at lower prices.

[1] : https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box

[2] : https://www.hetzner.com/cloud

Have you considered cheap object storage providers like Backblaze B2?

You don't write how much data you currently need, but I can recommend to start with time4vps and their storage VPS plans; https://www.time4vps.com/storage-vps/

I currently use their 9.99 EUR/mon plan with 2 TB storage for my Nextcloud installation.

Of course - at some point you will need more space and performance, and dedicated Hetzner (or similar) will be a better value-for-money option to continue with.

Try Kimsufi or SoyouStart

Backblaze B2 storage + Cloudflare CDN fronting it.

Pay Backblaze for uploads + storage. Free download + distribution via Cloudflare.

Will scale with you.

I pay $10/year for my VPS but it has only 10 or 15gb... Check out http://www.lowendstock.com/ for more options. Mine is probably as stable as Google's servers...

Contabo are the best for GB per €

Is you are in the US or Brazil, https://absam.io might be an interesting choice.

Their cheapest plan is 30 BRL (about 5.50 USD) for 1 GB or RAM and 50 GB of storage.

If your project can to use old-CPU servers with TB sized drives in them (DIY bare metal), three providers I've found with the lowest prices: dacentec.com, joesdatacenter.com, nocix.net

Hetzner SX - you get 40 TB storage for under €80/month, transfer included. It's hard to beat.

Racknerd with a discount code from lowendbox. They let you buy storage separately as well.

Can anybody recommend affordable server hosting with ECC RAM?

AWS Lightsail + S3