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Comment by flatiron | Hacker News Reader

For all that work why wouldn’t they just use a droplet for $5 a month?

Hey, it's a good resource for kids without money.

Considering all the hours I spent looking for ways to do exactly this when I was 12-15... I don't doubt I would've gone through all the trouble and even learned some AWS along the way.

Back in those days the only way I could get a free server was by hosting a phpBB forum on 000webhost and somehow convincing a VPS provider to "sponsor our forum". They'd get a massive banner ad and I'd get a free server to play around with. The good days!

Man, I used 000webhost a lot! Thanks for the reminder.

It was pretty great! There were a ton of free webhosts back then, they really fueled my creativity and desire to learn web dev.

000webhost, x10Hosting and SixServe (both had FREE cPanel!!), and never forget those shady reseller control panel hosts like Nazuka.

Hunting around for free cPanel hosting was essentially my part time job when I was 12-18. Many of them required certain forum activity too, so it could get time consuming.

Same here! Hours and hours searching.

I'll admit though, the shady reseller hosts were pretty good. Terrible control panel aside, they had very generous CPU/bandwidth/storage limits compared to the free cPanel hosts that had to cut down the costs there.

Not sure this is applicable to anyone else, but when it comes to being a kid with no money for me that meant literally no digital money. I had no bank account (at least not with a debit card associated) and my parents would not have given me theirs.

But the difference between a couple bucks a month and $5 once you actually have the ability to pay for stuff online does seems pretty negligible.

You're actually right, it's an oversight from my comment. I was in the same spot: some savings, none digital, parents weren't going to pay anything.

In any case, if it gets kids learning new things under the guise of saving a very limited resource, I'm all for it!

Here in Brazil there is a very widely supported payment method "boleto bancário", where basically the seller/provider prints you a bill that you can pay with a bank account, or in cash at physical locations (usually lottery houses and post offices).

In fact, some websites even offer big discounts (like 15%) for payments in boleto since there is basically no service fee.

That is basically how me and all my friends did "online" transactions.

Very good point. I remember being so excited when I got my first job at 16 and opened a bank account because I could finally purchase things online without having to do something like buy a prepaid debit card, which always had an overhead fee.

Even after that, I was always frugal and never wanted to spend something like $15 a month for a server for my friends. Now, as an adult software developer, I wouldn't think twice about the fun to dollar ratio of paying for a Minecraft server to connect with some old friends.

Same here! I had access to prepaid cards, but sadly cloud providers just don't accept them. (At least DigitalOcean didn't!)

Because you can't run a playable Minecraft server on a 5$/mo vm (especially if you play with mods) and you don't need the server to be on 24/7 if you just play with some friends. This gives you the ability to automatically spin a powerful server when needed (say a dozen hours a week) and only pay that amount instead of the full 168 hours.

They simply don't work.

The cheap VPS's absolutely do not allow you to pin the CPU to 100% usage for a significant amount of time since that messes up the provisioning. A Minecraft server will definitely pin the CPU to 100%.

What happens is that your process will be killed repeatedly.

A $5 VPS is great for simple site hosting and a small amount of CPU workload. They do not work at all for any type of game server.

>As long as you don’t go to 100% CPU usage for a long period of time, everything will be okay. DigitalOcean are doing pro active monitoring and will see if your droplet is having 100% CPU usage all the time and may limit the CPU capacity of the droplets displaying this behavior. Since each droplet shares physical hardware with other droplets, constant 100% CPU use degrades the service quality for other users on the same node.

Note that a game server will go to 100%. It will be killed.

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/cpu-usage-l...

I've run a Minecraft server on a $10/month DigitalOcean VPS for years.

What you describe has never happened to me. Have I just been lucky?

Yeah since it's a shared server others on the server can feel when someone's using a lot of CPU and complain. That's when they'll intervene. You're lucky here. Also it does depend on what's happening on the server. There's no chance of some of the complex mods working on a cheap instance.

Did you check %steal?

$5 a month would have been a LOT to young me. Maybe not unbearably so, but if someone told me of a way to do it for free, I would have definitely tried that method.

A $10/month droplet is probably closer to the minimum, and even then it struggles with only a handful of players. However that might be down to all the mods.

By droplet do you mean a DigitalOcean VM?

That is what they are called

Yes, "droplet" is what DO calls them.

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