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Comment by moreentropy | Hacker News Reader

I'm in the same situation (50 Mbps uplink at one place, 100Mbps at another) and that's enough to do all hosting for hobby projects at home, which I really love.

Instead of exposing my home directly using DynDNS, I got a really cheap low end server (currently a VM w/ 1 CPU, 512MB RAM and 400mbps traffic flat) for 1€/month that proxies all traffic to the (hidden) servers hosted at home.

The spec is enough to reliably run a HAproxy that can max out the available bandwidth w/o sweat and it allows me to do failover between servers in my two "home datacenters" + possibly cache assets.

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I use the Oracle Free Tier Arm instances for the same purpose! 4 cores, 24gb RAM, 200gb disk with unlimited 0.5gbps uplink, completely free forever.

many thanks, I managed to miss this one

This is the way.

I don't use it for home services (I don't have any), but use it in production for a couple of businesses for a decade.

Another advantage of this solution is what you can have ANY Internet connection, even 3G/4G/99G (and switch between your connections), your clients would still have the same IP to connect.

With a proper provider and configuration you can even host MS Exchange there.

Why not just use Cloudflare for this?

No specific reason against Cloudflare, just a DIY attutide in this case.

HAProxy is fun, and I also run it as a TCP proxy, so HTTPS is terminated in my (hidden) home server and I don't need to trust my proxy server, I guess that's not possible with cloudflare.

May I ask where you rent your ultra-cheap server from?

I'm using a Ionos (oneandone) VPS S: https://www.ionos.de/server/vps

1&1/Ionos is one of the largest and best connected ISP and Hosting providers in Germany, not some small shady shop. I see they doubled the price to 2€ though :)

I've had nothing but hell from 1&1/ionos ... if your billing has issues, be prepared to be treated like a criminal with few paths to easy resolution.

To be fair, whenever you pay 1-2€/Month for something, you cannot really expect human/timely interaction. Paying a single support employee to look into your case for 10minutes already erases all revenue from the past years from you.

Also, ain't this the introductory temporary price for the first six months?

Currently, it is. The "S" offering is at 2€/month long term. I'm still on a "S" contract that stays at 1€.

Can't complain about 1&1, also had dedicated 1HE boxes there for a long time w/o issues but I understand the grief in case something goes wrong.

I host DNS elsewhere so I can relocate such a simple proxy within a few minutes, that's what my desaster recovery plan looks like.

Seems to be a common theme with all the "big" hosting providers. Especially if they offer cheap services. They have an abuse problem so they set up automation to deal with it and they don't care about collateral damage; you're just a number, and not worth their time. Actual proper support costs more than race to the bottom allows for. Same deal as with Google et al, one day you might just get fucked.

Turns out finding a good, reliable hosting provider who isn't a tyrant and gives you the benefit of the doubt & treats you like a human when something's up is really really hard. And probably not very cheap. It's kinda sad that one could host all kinds of interesting things on a $5 device like raspberry pi zero, but then you have to pay out of your nose -- twice, and every month -- to get proper internet access.

I made a WordPress site for a friend through Ionos's managed offering. After a couple of months of the site being up, they decided to detach the database for literally no reason. I had to go through support to get it back up. I'm guessing it got erroneously flagged as over its quota, but they couldn't explain why it happened. Just my experience.

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