Highly Reliable VPS/"Cloud" server
Hi everyone!
I'm interested in a provider who offers extremely reliable & durable VPS/cloud servers. Here's what I'm looking for:
1 CPU (don't care what model assuming it's not total crap)
1-2 GB RAM
100 GB storage (with room to grow)
100 mbps up/down
400 GB outbound/month
3-5 TB inbound if metered.
Ideally, networked & replicated storage with an AFR < 0.1%, automated compute/instance failover and extremely solid network/power uptime > 99.99%.
Not performance sensitive - as long as its decent, I'll take it.
Budget is $20-40/month.
I've looked at the major public clouds which hit my reliability and price marks (Azure, IBM, Oracle especially), but I'm sure there's a lot of other great hosts out there, I'd love to try too.
Let's hear some offers!
Edit: Sorry, forgot to mention. USA/NA is highly preferred.

Comments
with that budget then stick with the them .. consider adding google.
Always think @Clouvider HA VPS is quite premium but sadly never used them before (Also because I missed a deal haha)
https://www.clouvider.com/cloud-vps/
Not as big as other cloud providers but they are decent enough.
食之无味 弃之可惜 - Too arduous to relish, too wasteful to discard.
i think i will get heart attack next day if you paid for one hahahha lol j/k
Yeah, I've looked at them too. Unfortunately, no US location (yet), otherwise they'd fit the bill perfectly.
Forgot to mention that in initial post - I've amended it to add that.
There was an offer quite a while ago that could fit in my impulsive buying range... I asked Dom few times but dont think he wants it happens again
食之无味 弃之可惜 - Too arduous to relish, too wasteful to discard.
Google is actually the one that's out of budget. LOL
Compute + storage would be ~ $20/m. Bandwidth @ standard rate is $40/m or so alone. I guess it's only a bit over, but there are much better options elsewhere
time flies so
you could check upcloud, they have 100% SLA iirc
I bench YABS 24/7/365 unless it's a leap year.
Can try OVH? https://us.ovhcloud.com/vps/compare/
My SG VPS with them has been running for 3+ years with 100% uptime
(I don't know their SLA though, but based on my experience with them I am confident to use them for production)
食之无味 弃之可惜 - Too arduous to relish, too wasteful to discard.
Thanks! That's on my short list too - we actually had a long chat with them when looking for a primary provider, though that dropped out. Have you had any experiences with them?
Thanks! Their pricing is unbeatable for what they offer (as a semi-big provider). Do you happen to know what their storage is backed by? I recall reading ceph somewhere, but that could just be their object storage.
OVH have great hw,specs,cp etc --- but support is almost 0.
So I've heard...Assuming no issues on their side, support (or lack of thereof) shouldn't be an issue, though I'd probably rather pay $10-20 more for someone to speak to if something does happen.
yep, pay $10-20 more - for support.
I have credits there so only use them hourly from time to time. couldn't afford long term usage though
what I can say is their performance is decent and network is pretty good. limited locations compared to vultr. their maxiops block storage should fit well for expansion.
I bench YABS 24/7/365 unless it's a leap year.
I see! Yeah, that (performance, network, storage) was pretty much our experience too with the couple hundred dollars in credit they were kind enough to give us for some in-depth evaluation. We didn't get a chance to evaluate their reliability over a long term though, and I've been hard pressed to find any review about that actually addresses it. I'd spin up a VM and watch it over a few months, but I don't have that kind of timeline unfortunately
racknerd (my signature) so far after 5 months? 100% uptime
Synteq Technical Support, Technical Writer.
Contact me at: +1 (307) 428 8111 or [email protected]
NO
NO
NO
NO
NO
NO
NO RackNerd please thanks, I already have enough at OGF + I won't ever define it as highly reliable.
食之无味 弃之可惜 - Too arduous to relish, too wasteful to discard.
i just had a few hours of network downtime days ago, so yeah definitely not 100% uptime.
good support, but not HA for sure.
I bench YABS 24/7/365 unless it's a leap year.
been solid in AMS for me lolz
Synteq Technical Support, Technical Writer.
Contact me at: +1 (307) 428 8111 or [email protected]
racknerd's really good for the price, but OP needs HA, that actually filters out most lowend providers.
otherwise i would have thrown letbox into the list as well with their block storage. 100% uptime for me in 2 years as far as i could see.
I bench YABS 24/7/365 unless it's a leap year.
I appreciate the response! But, that's probably a bit far from what I'm looking for.
I know the above experience would be far from the only one about network outages/storage failures, though I wouldn't expect much more given the price
Based on my experience, I'd stick with Azure when such availability is needed. No "low-end" provider I've seen does the same sort of proactive live migrations without downtime.
If you step down a notch you might want to consider LunaNode. They at least let you provision from a block volume, and if I recall correctly they will automatically re-launch on an available node if a block-backed VPS goes down.
Can confirm this is the case, but OP wanted US.
We're on Clouviders network in the US, and Hetrix is showing 99.9998% uptime in NY, but we don't currently have network/replicated storage there.
I think I got one if it's the offer I'm thinking of.
what kinda offer was that?
I bench YABS 24/7/365 unless it's a leap year.
I don't want to spoil the market so I will just PM you
Hint:
食之无味 弃之可惜 - Too arduous to relish, too wasteful to discard.
wow. that was really one off.
I bench YABS 24/7/365 unless it's a leap year.
Oh I don't remember that one?
I'm afraid Azure too is above your stated budget...

400GB of bandwidth alone is 35 dollars, add to that a crappy B1S (1 vCPU burstable, 10% baseline) instance...
(and you said you need 100 GB of storage too..)
Also, technically, in order to get a promise of 99.99% availability from M$, you'd need at least two of these...
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/legal/sla/virtual-machines/v1_9/
(otherwise it's just 99.9% at most)
Actually if it's just one server you're looking for (and not let say the same x10), and you'd be OK with either a 1/8 of an Epyc or up to couple of ARM cores / VPS, perhaps just go with Oracle Cloud?
https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/
Possible downside: Bandwidth might be limited only up to 50Mbps (based on various YABS samples for EPYC instances, example ; unsure about ARM)
Alternative (albeit similar) idea, provided Europe would also be tolerable: Hetzner! (has a lot of street cred in these circles and arguably provides what you're looking for)
https://www.hetzner.com/cloud (servers)
https://docs.hetzner.com/cloud/volumes/faq/ (block storage)
Contribute your idling VPS/dedi (link), Android (link) or iOS (link) devices to medical research
Hetzner has some ceph based vms, but thats EU.
Didnt clouvider expand to the USA recently-ish? Might be worth to ask them directly. @Clouvider
Hey teamacc. You're a dick. (c) Jon Biloh, 2020.
They've got dedis but the OnApp vps line is still UK only.
Thank you for everyone's replies! I think we're going to > @chimichurri said:
Yeah, you're right. I was looking at the wrong section for transfer.
That's a top contender right now. They've got the E4's for $20/m or so and the free tier covers everything else. 99.99% durability, live migrations.
Doesn't work for the same reason as Clouvider : (
Thank you for everyone's responses! We'll take a closer look at OVH's public cloud, Oracle, and Upcloud. If everyone has any experience with those, I'd love to hear.
1Gbps public bandwidth on 4core ARM instance.
Would give Oracle a miss...seemed like amateur hour last time I tried them
Interesting...thanks for sharing - if you don't mind elaborating, what issues did you hit with them?
try innoscale.net
OVH used to have CEPH backed VPS (auto migration in case something happens to your host node) but I don't know if they have that by now. Maybe on the "public cloud" line. Hetzner has it in EU but for now not in US. Maybe that will arrive sometime.
What are you trying to do anyway? Maybe you want to pursue some more serious high availability scheme. Multiple VPS with floating IP's, anycast routing to multiple DC's, etc. Cloudflare Workers might be another viable approach.
OVH public cloud uses Ceph, yeah - we actually used them for ~ 3 months, and moved away because IO latency performance was too lackluster actually, coupled with a few network stability issues now. We're on Upcloud right now, which is been decent so far.
That is obviously the ideal solution - they're internal-facing monitoring nodes - but Zabbix isn't something that easily runs in HA (done it before). At least, not until 6.0 is stable. Time/maintenance cost there doesn't make a lot of sense compared to a instance that can hold a 99.99%+ yearly standard, as we have backup systems for the remaining 52 minutes
It looks like hetzner are depreciating ceph on the cloud
Get the best deal on your next VPS or Shared/Reseller hosting from RacknerdTracker.com - The original aff garden.
https://docs.hetzner.com/cloud/servers/faq/#what-is-the-difference-between-local-and-ceph-disks-for-servers-on-the-cx-models
Contribute your idling VPS/dedi (link), Android (link) or iOS (link) devices to medical research
Hetzner or Lunanode?
I have generally found dedicated servers to have less random downtime than VPS of any sort. VPS operators are always rebooting the host node for something, etc. So for your purposes, maybe try a small Kimsufi.
What about Ramnode?
I was with them from 2013-2019 when Nick was running it and they were superb - especially support.
But now since they got bought, I'm not sure if they're still as good as they were before.
"The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity." — Ralph Waldo Emerson
For lower-range providers, probably - but most mid-high range providers - eg, OVH, 3 Big Clouds, etc will have live migrations for host-node maintenance. In theory, virtualized should offer better reliability. Honestly, though, that's sometimes not the case.
Exactly. A UK provider I've been with for a while I know does this. They did a write up about it when mitigating the intel bugs (spectre etc) and I've got a VPS with them that just hit 4 years uptime.
They were bought out by iomart so the technical side (blog posts, technical staff to speak too, etc) has all gone unfortunately but I did manage a DC tour before hand lol.
That was the idea of CEPH backed VPS but the performance hit is significant. It was interesting to hear that Hetzner has deprecated it now.
Live migration does not require Ceph. Live migration works with KVM and any form of local storage as well. It‘s a bit slow, because it has to copy the entire VMs disk, but for the purpose of upgrading host nodes where you can schedule the migration upfront that’s not really an issue.
The advantage of Ceph is replication over multiple servers instead of just multiple disks (as with RAID). That‘s a core component for High-Availability, as you can immediately restart a VM on another hypervisor and don’t need to try to manually recover the VMs data from the crashed node. But Ceph isn’t a requirement for live migrations and zero-downtime host upgrades.
— Michael
Alwyzon - Virtual Servers in Austria starting at 4,49 €/month (excl. VAT)
https://novos.be/ is using ceph
Amadex • Hosting Forums • root.hr
We are indeed phasing out Ceph-based cloud products. If anyone has any detailed questions about them, please write to our support team directly. The technicians on the cloud team will be able to better help you.
We're Katie and Lea and we'll do our best to answer questions you have about Hetzner Online. We and not our employer are responsible for any horrible puns and dated cultural references.