Nairobi. 180ms to Europe, 280ms to US East. Auction servers make no sense here because the latency kills everything interactive.
We use AWS Cape Town or Vultr Johannesburg — https://www.vultr.com/pricing/ is what I check when I need another instance. 45ms to JHB, still not great but usable. Bare metal in Africa is basically nonexistent at consumer prices.
Reading this thread with envy. Your 18 eur boxes cost me 80 eur equivalent after transit and the experience is worse.
Opposite experience. Hetzner FI-02: I had a six hour outage last October. Routing loop, their side. Status page said "network issues" for four hours before they admitted the scope to me.
Contabo DE-01: two brief disconnects, under 5 minutes each. OVHcloud NL-02: one 40 minute maintenance that ran 90 minutes over.
Sample size of one each, but "zero downtime" is not the universal experience.
This. Power gap is real but for rented boxes its abstracted. The real trap is thinking auction = always available. Stock disappears, configs change, your perfect box might not exist next month.
Plan for replacement, not permanence.
Following this thread. Currently on Vultr cloud, considering bare metal for a database. Leaning toward Hetzner auction if I can catch stock.
Set up alerts on lowendbox or hetzners auction RSS. The good configs go in hours. E5-2680v4 with 256GB is the current sweet spot, usually 26-29 eur.
Avoid anything with Samsung PM863a SSDs. High failure rate in that generation. HGST and Intel drives have been solid for me.
