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Comment by ivraatiems | Hacker News Reader

I moved to BuyVM, https://buyvm.net/. I had already been using their services for a few years, I just expanded on what I already had.

They are not as large an enterprise as DigitalOcean, by a long shot, but the upside of that is you can speak with the owner and his small staff personally and get personal service. They made me a very good deal.

I also know from their Discord that they have some conservative political leanings, so if that's a thing that matters to you either way, it's there. I don't find it to be represented in their behavior towards customers or who they choose to host, so it was acceptable to me even though I feel differently.

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+1 to BuyVM. Happy customer for multiple years.

They are really the perfect size for me: big enough for multiple locations, R&D, and support coverage; but small enough so that you personally interact with the team, and you have trust that a random DMCA isn't going to end up with your site nuked.

The privacy-first stance (including allowing Tor exit nodes! sorely needed on independent infra!), and general willingness to help you ad-hoc (e.g. you wanna announce your own IP range? they'll do it, charge you a fair price for the work).

On the other hand, I woke up one day with my DigitalOcean droplet suspended and account banned, and support absolutely refuses to tell me why. My only suspicion is perhaps because I used the GitHub Student Pack even after I was no longer a student.

It blows my mind that people will hang out in a Discord for a VPS provider and express their political opinions. Communities form around anything nowadays.

BuyVM is more or less a free speech host: if it's legal, they'll (usually) host it.

It's my view that we need this on the internet.

I'm not for or against BuyVM. I'm just surprised that nowadays people will hang out in a VPS provider's Discord. Like if Wawa had a Discord and people decided to hang out there. I just don't get it.

I think people would totally do that for Wawa. I know some people who are crazy into the whole Wawa vs Sheetz debate.

There's a whole community around "low-end" VPS and server hosting, and BuyVM's staff have historically been active figures in that community. The Discord is an offshoot of that. It's not all that unusual; a lot of companies do community outreach by running communities for people who do things related to their services. Digital Ocean themselves do this in another form with their documentation libraries.

BuyVM's brand relies on the perception that they are laid-back, pro-free-speech, friendly, and helpful. The Discord is a way of broadcasting that. Now, personally - I think that attracts some people I wouldn't prefer to attract. But I know they've drawn lines in the past (banning overtly anti-Semitic people, for instance), so, fair enough. Their pro-speech attitude helped me when a site I ran was subjected to bogus legal threats from an unhinged former user.

BuyVM's wiki has things in it like https://wiki.buyvm.net/doku.php/kvm#pagefileswap_disclaimer, which, without any numbers behind it would make me extremely uneasy to use the service. Other cheap hosts just put hard IO limits at the VM host level.

BuyVM is a team run by humans who do care about every customer. As long as you're doing something malicious-y (like crypto mining, exploit testing random websites, distributing malware or a phishing site, etc), they will work with you.

> As long as you're doing something malicious-y (like crypto mining, exploit testing random websites, distributing malware or a phishing site, etc), they will work with you.

Is this an extension of the Russian Business Network, or did you miss a negation in there? :-)

Not treating people differently based on their beliefs sounds like someone with leanings on either side, rather than extremists on either side.

Yeah. There are definitely people on their Discord I'd call extreme, but none of those people work for or speak for the company. They aren't people I would choose to associate with, but it's a free country.

I thought about it quite a bit, actually. But there is a line there and they haven't crossed it.

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