TierHive - NAT Native - /24 per customer - Lab in the cloud - Free to try.

AnthonySmith

Hi Folks,

Following the successful initial test in the Exclusive section, things went pretty well with just a few hiccups, so we are making this more public. We hit 50 users live in the first 24 hours, which is great, and we are already pushing quickly towards 100 users live.

Forward/Warning: This product is in Public Alpha; it is not enterprise-grade and probably never will be. More on that during sign-up.

Please ask any questions.

Many more comments in the exclusive offer in case anyone missed that: https://lowendspirit.com/discussion/10288/tierhive-from-the-creators-of-les-nat-done-different-free-to-try

What is it?

Simple version https://tierhive.com It's a KVM NAT VPS product on ultra low cost with hourly billing.

• Ever need a VPS quickly for a short lived thing? have this on hot standby!
• Want your own multi-location lan/lab but dont want to run it at home? give this a try"
• Can you manage your backups and know your DR? why pay more?

Why is it different?

• We allocate **a full /24 ** to you to use as you want, e.g. 10.200.50.0/24 so you can use 10.200.50.2-254
• You get 2 ports per VPS with ssh auto forwarding. (TCP+UDP)
• You can change VPS specs as you want.
• You can turn on/off dhcp as you want.
• Your VPS bridge is meshed whcih means 10.200.50.20 in London can ping 10.200.50.30 in Canada directly.
• 1 hour minimum.
• Free to try as standard.
• SQL Offloading
• Mail relay available
• Self install available
• Configure your own DHCP Options (including for pxe on your private LAN)
• Self-migrate your own servers between locations.
• Quick install / recipes for Wordpress
• Earn credit by contributing.
• SSL Termination
• HAproxy load balancer and failover.
• We only need a username, email address and password; we don't store your personal details.

Where is it?

https://tierhive.com

How much?

Well, we bill for what you use/want, not a month in advance; we just have a 1-hour minimum.

Examples / COST:

• 128 MB Ram, 1 GB Disk - from $0.000135 per hour, which is about $0.10 per month.
• 1 GB Ram, 5 GB Disk - from $0.001022 per hour, which is around $0.75 per month.

We have extensive defences built in for those trying to exploit the free tokens offer, lifetime bans will be handed out liberally for this

How does it work?

• 1 token = $1 - We give you 1 token just for signing up.
• Add credit when you have had time to test it, $5 minimum, and currently a $10 maximum.
• No need to commit, if it's not for you, then no problem, you lost nothing.

What is a NAT KVM Anyway?

• For those that somehow still don't know how their own routers at home probably work, you share an external IP, you get ports forwarded to your VPS so you can connect.

A bit more about the product for those still reading:

• Really, per hour, your credit is indefinite; you don't pay anything to exist, if nothing is active, you pay nothing.
• You get a whole /24 allocated to your account, and you allocate your own IP addresses from that.
• Every VPS gets 2 x TCP+UDP ports
• If you allocate 10.0.20.2 to VPS 1 in London, and 10.0.20.3 to VPS 2 in Canada, they can directly communicate with each other over your bridged LAN on any port.
• You can set up your own tftpd/ipxe server on your LAN and enable/disable DHCP
• You can boot into ipxe directly and chinload netboot.xyz if you want, and install whatever you need.
• You can self-migrate your own VPS between locations.
• We have a recipe system where you will find official recipes for things like OpenVPN, WordPress, LibreNMS, WireGuard and others.
• You can also store your own multivps recipes and deployment scripts privately or you can share them with the community with a direct feedback and an anonymous bug tracking system.
• If people use your recipes, you get credit in return as a thank you from us.
• We have MariaDB and PostgreSQL offloading if you want us to do the heavy work for you.
• We have an email relay service, so if you need something to send emails, for transactional stuff, that is provided along with delivery tracking, and we also allow access to other major external services SES etc.
• We offer network storage, which you can attach to your VPS and move between VPS
• We offer a VPS backup system along with scheduling with options for overwriting or multiple version.
• We have a configurable HAProxy Service with SSL Termination which can rin in single location, single server (backend) mode, or you can take advantage of all our external IP's ad have them all point at your VPS (apparently people like that for SEO) or you can have a multi VPS setup with rounrobin or failover or sticky sessions and you can configure your own weighting.
• SSL Termination done via LetsEncrypt.
• You can change your VPS resources yourself; disk only goes up it cannot shrink, but you can change your RAM, CPU Priority, Disk IOPS, network bandwidth and apply it yourself.

If you want your own little LAN in the cloud, you're a hobbyist, or like to play with new things, or even a developer who wants access to cheap resources for a short term with persistent network disks you can attach and detach almost like a USB stick with everything provided and a recipe deployment system, then I invite you to try it.

Screenshots:

arirang

1. How reliable is bridge between locations if you've done test?
2. It seems Haproxy is region specific, could backend server be pointed to different region?

AnthonySmith

@arirang said:
1. How reliable is bridge between locations if you've done test?
2. It seems Haproxy is region specific, could backend server be pointed to different region?

1. For artificial testing, no issues, and this is the public Alpha with free tokens, for you to test anything you want, Please report any issues.

2. Sort of, i guess you would need to select globlal distribution get it alive then remove the A records you dont want to respond, you will see a missing A record warning but it will work anyway.

jcn50

Bugs on the "Resource Settings":
1) the sliders are not set to their initial values, they are higher... I didn't pay attention and increased the values there of the RAM and Disk, meh.
2) After increasing the network I got this message:
Reboot Required Changing RAM or Disk size requires the VPS to be rebooted. This may cause a few minutes of downtime. Do you wish to proceed?
Then I click on "Yes, Apply and Reboot" [which sounded odd for just a Network setting change], then I got a ERROR 502 or 503 with the message "Please refresh + F5" something like that.

AnthonySmith

Thanks for the feedback.

1. yep, that needs to be changed.
2. I guess if 1 is fixed that issue goes away.
   2.1 I suspect thats a WAF issue, I will have the logs checked.

jcn50

On this page:
https://control.tierhive.com/vps-instances
the "Refresh" button doesn't work.

jcn50

Feedback: in the case of a Reinstall, it would be great to reset the RAM + DISK again (to lower/increase the instance again, since we start from scratch). I know it says: "The current resource configuration will be preserved" ; but I want to reset everything (and especially keep my port).

jcn50

Meh, I just played with an instance resizing it within the span of 10 minutes, and was charged 1 hour minimum after each change, that's deadly! ☠️ I know it's only pennies (for my current instant size) but still~. It would be great to lower this to a 5-minutes min charge (ideally 1 min).

Question: is there a plan to be able to pick the amount of vCPU core too?..

MrEd

Just went through the screenshots and the project looks awesome! Good luck to make something bigger out of that

AnthonySmith

@jcn50 i appreciate the feedback but we do have a bug reports and feedback section in the app itself in the support section.

AnthonySmith

well, it was going well up to yesterday, now it has gone public, people are registering 10+ accounts for free tokens haha, the internet, fun place, ban hammer incoming, cant say there was no warning

jcn50

@backtogeek said:
@jcn50 i appreciate the feedback but we do have a bug reports and feedback section in the app itself in the support section.

Oh sorry I thought you wanted it here. Shall I refile them as tickets now?

AnthonySmith

can do, it just helps us track them and pass them to the dev, who is not active here, but no pressure.

imok

@backtogeek said:
well, it was going well up to yesterday, now it has gone public, people are registering 10+ accounts for free tokens haha, the internet, fun place, ban hammer incoming, cant say there was no warning

People...

mannen

Looks like a really cool idea! I imagine it would be nice to use this to play around with dn42!

yoursunny

Can we choose to make our /24 reachable from other customers?
Basically, host a hidden web service that is only accessible by TierHive nodes.

PS. We’ll give you a pass from “No IPv6 hall of shame” until you are out of alpha status.

AnthonySmith

@yoursunny said:
Can we choose to make our /24 reachable from other customers?
Basically, host a hidden web service that is only accessible by TierHive nodes.

PS. We’ll give you a pass from “No IPv6 hall of shame” until you are out of alpha status.

hmm, interesting idea, i mean, its not that hard to do I guess, maybe a public project board or something to go with it, Tierhive reachable only? what did you have in mind, might help me think about how that could work?

I appreciate the pass, you will get a /60 when it happens that you can split and route/home a /64 per location (cahangeable) and obviously support BGP.

AnthonySmith

@mannen said:
Looks like a really cool idea! I imagine it would be nice to use this to play around with dn42!

never considered that, but yeah, you could do that, you could also use it as a devops lab, all sorts.

contactwajeeh

the webserver config modal on the haproxy page is not dismissible, also the scrolling inside the modal doesn't work.

also a quick question, I cant see UK node in the database page. is that on the roadmap.

AnthonySmith

@contactwajeeh said:
the webserver config modal on the haproxy page is not dismissible, also the scrolling inside the modal doesn't work.

also a quick question, I cant see UK node in the database page. is that on the roadmap.

Can you pop a ticket in with some details, would be useful to know which browser, version and plugins you have, I can't replicate that.

Yes we plan to add SQL offloading to the UK.

gomi

We're At Capacity
We're sorry, but we are currently at capacity and are not accepting new user registrations at this time.

We regularly open up new capacity, so please check back later. We appreciate your interest in TierHive!

AnthonySmith

@gomi said:
We're At Capacity
We're sorry, but we are currently at capacity and are not accepting new user registrations at this time.

We regularly open up new capacity, so please check back later. We appreciate your interest in TierHive!

Yep, sorry we are opening things up slowly and sadly despite not accepting orders from china we have been posted on some cheap VPS forums in china and have been totally smashed with people from those forums trying to abuse the free tokens with multiple accounts each.

This hit limits we set artificially, so now I have the fun task of closing all the duplicate accounts and banning all the people that abused it.

It will open up again soon.

To be honest I was planning on taking a less aggressive stance on VPN / DC IP registrations as you are literally forced to try before you buy, but I see now that just leads to a whole different set of issues.

AnthonySmith

Registrations open again.

gomi

@backtogeek said:

@gomi said:
We're At Capacity
We're sorry, but we are currently at capacity and are not accepting new user registrations at this time.

We regularly open up new capacity, so please check back later. We appreciate your interest in TierHive!

Yep, sorry we are opening things up slowly and sadly despite not accepting orders from china we have been posted on some cheap VPS forums in china and have been totally smashed with people from those forums trying to abuse the free tokens with multiple accounts each.

This hit limits we set artificially, so now I have the fun task of closing all the duplicate accounts and banning all the people that abused it.

It will open up again soon.

To be honest I was planning on taking a less aggressive stance on VPN / DC IP registrations as you are literally forced to try before you buy, but I see now that just leads to a whole different set of issues.

so sorry to hear that,as i had seen in some channel in discord,some free service would closed as many abuse from Iran,indian,Southeast Asia.is it chinese people do that too?

hope u can manage it and open it again!

gomi

@backtogeek said:
Registrations open again.

i got in now
and i found that a little bit complicated for beginners

gomi

The rounded corners of this UI look a bit strange.

gomi

The overall color scheme doesn’t feel very harmonious.
haha, these are just my personal thoughts; this product is already great, no need to worry too much about it.

jcn50

@gomi said: and i found that a little bit complicated for beginners

This is is what it looks like at first (especially when looking at the screenshots), but step by step you comprehend it.

gomi

@jcn50 said:

@gomi said: and i found that a little bit complicated for beginners

This is is what it looks like at first (especially when looking at the screenshots), but step by step you comprehend it.

yeh,when i get the first one, i found it's more user-friendly than the management interfaces of many VPS providers.

ahnlak

If you create a new instance and set your DNS Resolvers to OpenDNS, it seems to break DNS - their resolvers appear to be configured on the VPS end, so I'm guessing it's breaking somewhere in the NAT?

(I would investigate further, but without DNS I can't install any net tools to explore!)

AnthonySmith

@ahnlak said:
If you create a new instance and set your DNS Resolvers to OpenDNS, it seems to break DNS - their resolvers appear to be configured on the VPS end, so I'm guessing it's breaking somewhere in the NAT?

(I would investigate further, but without DNS I can't install any net tools to explore!)

Thanks I will test that now.

AnthonySmith

@gomi said:

@jcn50 said:

@gomi said: and i found that a little bit complicated for beginners

This is is what it looks like at first (especially when looking at the screenshots), but step by step you comprehend it.

yeh,when i get the first one, i found it's more user-friendly than the management interfaces of many VPS providers.

We did have a toggle switch "Easy | Standard | pro" But no one could agree what went in each, different people know different things, we did all agree that Easy should be "Vps Instances, Support, Billing, Account Setting" only and that becomes the default... butthen maybe people dont notice the toggle swicth or never click it and never see the features... so tbh, in the end we just removed it.

AnthonySmith

@ahnlak said:
If you create a new instance and set your DNS Resolvers to OpenDNS, it seems to break DNS - their resolvers appear to be configured on the VPS end, so I'm guessing it's breaking somewhere in the NAT?

(I would investigate further, but without DNS I can't install any net tools to explore!)

cant replicate, just deployed a fresh VPS, backend config is fine, vps config is fine, can resolve fine, can I suggest simply changing to google locally on the VPS while you troubleshoot? or if it persists please open a ticket and connect the VPS to the ticket so we can backtrace.

Thanks!

jcn50

@backtogeek

Questions:
1) will you add the ability to increase the number of vCPUs in the future?
2) when/where will be the future servers' locations?
3) do you have any published roadmap?
4) any plan to create some documentation (I am thinking especially for guidance about the creation of Recipes)?
5) any plan to create its own community (forum)? Or will LES become the defacto place?
6) any plan to have an API?

AnthonySmith

@jcn50 said:
@backtogeek

Questions:
1) will you add the ability to increase the number of vCPUs in the future?
2) when/where will be the future servers' locations?
3) do you have any published roadmap?
4) any plan to create some documentation (I am thinking especially for guidance about the creation of Recipes)?
5) any plan to create its own community (forum)? Or will LES become the defacto place?
6) any plan to have an API?

1. Probably when we move everything to dual EPYC we will just give 2 cores as standard and maximum, honestly if you need more, this is not the right service for you.
2. Every OVH + Hetzner location is the first goal, if any LE hosts offer us a deal we cant resist then there too
3. We ran out of road at "Make it available to the public" if this test goes well we will start adding to it (This is not the only thing we are working on) if this does not pay for itself or have enough interest, we will refund and shut it down and probably just open source it.
4. Yes, actually a bit of its written and there will also be a blog section showing real-world examples and use cases with step-by-step instructions.
5. Yeah I thought about that, it would be trivial to integrate a forum directly into the panel, actually, nothing fancy, but possible, i dont want to take away from LES though, might be a weekend project when we hit burn out with everything else.
6. We have one, I just made the decision not to expose it on day 1, this has actually been built with an API first mindset, because if/when it goes to beta, there will be a full command-line version that will rely on the API.

This is a very human-level project; it's not trying to be enterprise, and all our eggs are not in this basket, but it is something I VERY much hope works out, as long as it covers its own costs it will exist.

ahnlak

@backtogeek said:

@ahnlak said:
If you create a new instance and set your DNS Resolvers to OpenDNS, it seems to break DNS - their resolvers appear to be configured on the VPS end, so I'm guessing it's breaking somewhere in the NAT?

(I would investigate further, but without DNS I can't install any net tools to explore!)

cant replicate, just deployed a fresh VPS, backend config is fine, vps config is fine, can resolve fine, can I suggest simply changing to google locally on the VPS while you troubleshoot? or if it persists please open a ticket and connect the VPS to the ticket so we can backtrace.

Thanks!

Hmm; might be Debian13 being ... debian, but I'll see if I can track it down further!

Might be location dependent - CA works fine, but London borks. I think it's OpenDNS rejecting queries, possibly rate-limiting because the NAT sends all the traffic out of the same IP?

terrorgen

@backtogeek said:
... and obviously support BGP.

You're going to let people be your downstream?!

We are listening

AnthonySmith

@ahnlak said:

@backtogeek said:

@ahnlak said:
If you create a new instance and set your DNS Resolvers to OpenDNS, it seems to break DNS - their resolvers appear to be configured on the VPS end, so I'm guessing it's breaking somewhere in the NAT?

(I would investigate further, but without DNS I can't install any net tools to explore!)

cant replicate, just deployed a fresh VPS, backend config is fine, vps config is fine, can resolve fine, can I suggest simply changing to google locally on the VPS while you troubleshoot? or if it persists please open a ticket and connect the VPS to the ticket so we can backtrace.

Thanks!

Hmm; might be Debian13 being ... debian, but I'll see if I can track it down further!

I also used Debian 13

AnthonySmith

@terrorgen said:

@backtogeek said:
... and obviously support BGP.

You're going to let people be your downstream?!

We are listening

Haha well I don't know if you have signed up yet but if you think about how we do it, you get your subnet and meshed bridges between locations already before you even have a VPS, everything is network first service on top.

So you can probably imagine using some sort of BGP interface on your network page and being able to pin subnets or IPs etc which then becomes available for you to use.

Same idea for ipv6 when that's added.

terrorgen

@backtogeek said:

@terrorgen said:

@backtogeek said:
... and obviously support BGP.

You're going to let people be your downstream?!

We are listening

Haha well I don't know if you have signed up yet but if you think about how we do it, you get your subnet and meshed bridges between locations already before you even have a VPS, everything is network first service on top.

So you can probably imagine using some sort of BGP interface on your network page and being able to pin subnets or IPs etc which then becomes available for you to use.

Same idea for ipv6 when that's added.

No we mean announcing our own prefixes and asn externally.

AnthonySmith

@terrorgen said: No we mean announcing our own prefixes and asn externally.

oh.

jcn50

@backtogeek said: Probably when we move everything to dual EPYC we will just give 2 cores as standard and maximum, honestly if you need more, this is not the right service for you.

1vCPU as standard is fine, but I can see that you made it working for Web Hosting APPS (WordPress) and this can be CPU hungry.

bmoto

Congratulations on a really nice next level NAT project, Ant. I thought you were planning on slowing the pace in your "old age". Then you come up with this ^. Some people can't sit still, I guess. Wishing you the best

AnthonySmith

@bmoto said:
Congratulations on a really nice next level NAT project, Ant. I thought you were planning on slowing the pace in your "old age". Then you come up with this ^. Some people can't sit still, I guess. Wishing you the best

Thanks, well the big difference is, if this does not work out, I wont lose any sleep, it was fun.

AnthonySmith

Registrations locked, sadly, the free token is just attracting half of China, and it's more work manually checking and closing accounts than it's worth, so we are going to have to change it up.

risturiz

Disable the free token? :-)

AnthonySmith

@risturiz said:
Disable the free token? :-)

We are looking at options. Sadly, people spoil things for the good guys and don't understand the true cost of abuse on small startups and businesses. We are not Amazon.

I had other things to do; I have spent 2 days in the background working on preventing abuse, not a good use of my time right now.

Right now, the tokens have been reduced to 0.25 for new sign-ups, and they will expire after 60 days.

And we will add other ways to get free tokens that require a small bit of effort or exchange, kind of like Digital Ocean did when they started, a tweet, a backlink, a referal link or something, i dont know right now, I am focusing on stripping out the 100's of China accounts.

but also, its day 5? (I think) of a public Alpha... so it's good data I guess.

AnthonySmith

OK, long day, but we have opened the registrations again, reduced to 0.25, we are not going to touch any of the current issued tokens, don't worry (Unless you registered a bunch of accounts, in which case you now have 0).

We were going to time-limit the use of free tokens, but we decided against that in the end.

Trying to strike a balance that allows good people to test it fully without making it far too tempting to the people who love free chicken!

As a reminder, we don't accept REGISTRATIONS from CN, BR, VN, RU, IR or people physically there using a proxy or VPN, or from disposable emails.

terrorgen

@backtogeek said: or people physically there using a proxy or VPN

Curious... how do you identify them

I can understand if you don't want to spill your secret sauce in case people get a clue... so no pressure if you don't want to do so.

AnthonySmith

@terrorgen said:

@backtogeek said: or people physically there using a proxy or VPN

Curious... how do you identify them

I can understand if you don't want to spill your secret sauce in case people get a clue... so no pressure if you don't want to do so.

haha, right now... badly, obvious human error, but we are working on some sauce

Murv

@backtogeek said: we don't accept REGISTRATIONS from CN, BR, VN, RU, IR

Now I want to REGISTER just out of spite.