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Hetzner.

For most public cloud providers you have to give them your credit card number so they can charge an arbitrary amount.

For Hetzner, instead of CC#, you give a scan of your ID (of course you can attach your CC too or Paypal). Personally I do my payments via a bank transfer. I recently paid for the whole 2025 and 2026 for all my k8s clusters. It gives unimaginable peace of mind when compared to AWS/GCP/Azure.

Plus, their cloud instances often spin up much faster than EC2.

For bare metal I’ve been using tier.net to get 192 GB RAM, 4TB NVME and 32 cores for $219/mo.

Data centers all over the country and I get to locate under 10ms from my regional audience.

Just a data point if you want some bigger iron than a VM.

I have used Knownhost previously, it served me really well.

Before that, I used to go for Linode, but I think they've become more pricey?

Linode was bought by Akamai. They immediately raised prices, and they have been, if anything, less reliable.

Ahh, yes, I remember now! I think it's almost 8 years now? Stopped using them after the buy out.

Too bad, actually, their service was pretty good.

Hetzner! They do ask for ID though.