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Comment by frankjr | Hacker News Reader

While I completely understand the allure of running on your own hardware, if you just want a cheap server to host a personal page or similar, you cannot beat Scaleway's Stardust VM instances. For less than 2 EUR a month you get 1 vCPU, 1 GB of RAM, 1 IPv4+IPv6 address, 10GB of storage and unlimited traffic. They claim up-to 100Mbps bandwidth but I regularly get much more than that. This sounds like a commercial but I'm just really happy with the service.

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https://www.scaleway.com/en/stardust-instances/

I am not a fan of the lottery approach and being told you're lucky to do business with them.

I understand it more like a struggle to keep up it the demand for these instances and this was their attempt to "gamify" it.

The lottery approach pissed me off so bad, I decided to leave Scaleway altogether. They also aren’t upfront about their contingents. I wanted to try out an M1 instance and before registering and putting my credit card info in, it seemed like it’d be all fine, I just have to put in cc info. I did, they told me there are no instances available. The fair way would be to be upfront about it in my opinion.

Hetzner might have M1 mac available:

https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/mac-mini-m1

It isn't a lottery as much as an availability constraint.

First you have a limit of 1 stardust per datacenter per customer. Second, they only spin up a fixed number of new stardust servers per day.

It is a loss leader just like in any other business. They are losing money on one instance to get you in the door and you realize their other services are awesome.

It's clear this service is a social media psyop and the GP poster mentioning it is in on it.

You can find a lot of cheap VM instances at this site. I use buyvm.net and I've been happy with them the last 5 years.

https://lowendbox.com/

I think local hardware makes sense for LAN-only sites - e.g. a company wiki, a media center or a file storage with web interface.

For anything that is supposed to be visible on the internet, I'd always use a hosted server - if nothing else, because I really don't want to open an ingress into my personal home network, even if my ISP permitted that.

For use-cases were you have to handle certain incoming requests even though your setup is mostly LAN-only otherwise (webhooks, ACME, adding some dashboard you can access from your phone...), services like PageKite[1] sound promising.

[1] http://pagekite.net/

That pagekite looks handy! I’ve recently got gigabit fiber at home but my routers ipv6 firewall is crap. This seems easier than just making a custom vpn to a cloud instance.

an Argo tunnel is even easier. You can even get it for free; https://noise.getoto.net/2019/06/15/a-free-argo-tunnel-for-y...

It seems to be what Mozilla IoT/WebThings uses under the hood. So that's at least one credential :)

I stumbled over the service by trying to understand how the WebThings gateway was supposed to work.

https://iot.mozilla.org/docs/gateway-getting-started-guide.h...

https://github.com/WebThingsIO/registration_server/blob/mast...

I would recommend Racknerd as well. Not affiliated with them except a happy customer. I pay $36/yr for my 2 GB memory, 2 vCPU, 50 GB SSD VPS that I run Nextcloud on. I also have a $16/yr VPS with 1.5 GB memory and 30 GB SSD for K3s

Interesting. I hadn't heard of them. Their yearly prices are excellent.

Not unlimited data though. But I'll keep them on my list, thanks

I've been using OVH VPSs for a long time.

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