Welcome to HostPeers — start here

Welcome to HostPeers — a forum for folks who run workloads on tight budgets.

This is a space to talk about cheap VPS, dedicated servers, colocation, networking, and domains. Whether you are squeezing performance out of a $3/month NAT box or running a full 42U of decommissioned enterprise gear, you belong here.

Community rules are simple. Be respectful. No spam. Technical arguments are welcome; personal attacks are not. We do not allow referral code spam or shilling disguised as reviews.

New accounts require manual approval. This is annoying but necessary. Expect a wait of a few hours to two days. If you are clearly a real human and your signup reason is coherent, you will get through.

That is all. Thank you for being early. — Admin

About time someone made a space that is not just affiliate links and "review" posts written by people who have never logged into a server.

I have been in this business for 20 years. Back when a "low end" box meant a real machine with real transit and you compiled your own kernel because the provider's template was broken. Kids these days think a NAT VPS with 128MB RAM is "hosting." Mark my words, half these fly-by-night shops will be gone by next summer and their customers will be crying on some Discord.

Still. Better here than the alternatives. I will watch and see.

This takes me back. I got my first real dedicated in 2009 from a little shop in Kansas City. Dual Xeon L5420, 8GB DDR2, two 250GB WD RE3 drives in software RAID 1. Cost me $49 a month and I thought I was king of the world.

They don't make them like that anymore. The hardware, I mean. Sure you can get a Ryzen 9 with NVMe for less money now, adjusted for inflation. But there was something about those old Harpertowns. You knew exactly what you were getting. No noisy neighbors because the node was your node. I ran that box for six years until the PSU finally gave up. Provider sent me the drives in a shoebox.

Good luck with the forum. I will probably lurk more than post.

On topic: manual account approval is a sound policy. The signal-to-noise ratio on hosting forums degrades rapidly without it. I would suggest also implementing IRR validation for any ASNs users claim to operate, if that becomes relevant. Too many people announce prefixes without proper route objects and then wonder why their upstream filters them.

For the networking-curious here: if you are buying cheap transit, check whether your provider supports BGP communities for traffic engineering. Even budget upstreams often support basic ones like 65535:0 for GRACEFUL_SHUTDOWN. RPKI ROAs are non-negotiable now. If your provider does not let you create them, find one that does. The days of "just announce it and hope" are over.

I am AS64512, by the way. Mostly research prefixes an

Hey folks

Kat here, one of your mods. Just want to echo admin on the be-nice rule — it is not a suggestion. I have moderated hosting communities before and the technical passion here is great, but tempers flare fast when money and uptime are involved. 🙂

Haroldgsm, your cynicism is noted and honestly somewhat earned. But let us not scare off the 128MB NAT crowd entirely. Some of them grow into the 42U crowd. Or at least the single-Ryzen-colocation crowd.

Richard7, that shoebox story is fantastic. Would love a full thread on oldest production hardware still running if you are ever up for it.

GeorgeNmp, thanks for the networking primer. I suspect we will be pointing new users to your posts often.

Approvals are moving faster now that we have a few hands on deck. See you around.

Good to see a forum that remembers hardware exists.

I am mostly rack and stack. Current project is a pallet of Dell R630s I picked up from a liquidation. $45 each, dual E5-2620 v3, 64GB DDR4, no drives. Power draw at idle is about 65W, peaks around 140W under full load. Not bad for 2014 gear. I am stuffing them with used Samsung PM863a 960GB SATA SSDs, about $18 a pop if you buy ten.

For cheap colocation I have been using a place in Buffalo that does quarter racks at $180/month with 10A 120V and 1Gbps unmetered. Not going to name them since they are not on the approved list, but you can find them if you look. Just watch your power budget. Those R630s add up fast if you fill a full 10U.

Will keep an eye on the dedicated server deals section. Always looking for more pallets.

Which Buffalo colo, the 10A or 20A option?

10A. The 20A is $320 and I do not need it yet. I am running four R630s in a quarter rack right now, total draw around 280W at the meter after PDU loss. Leaves me headroom for a switch and maybe one more box if I am careful.

The 10A circuit is 120V not 208V, so you are capped at ~1200W usable. Fine for older DDR4 gear, but if you are bringing EPYC or anything with GPUs forget it. They also offer 208V but only on full racks and the price jumps.

I should mention their remote hands is $75/hour with a one hour minimum. I have only needed it once when an SSD backplane cable came loose in shipping. Cheaper than a train ticket but still annoying.

You are throwing good money after bad. Those v3s are already on the wrong side of the efficiency curve and the PM863a is read-intensive TLC with no power-loss protection worth mentioning. I have seen that exact drive fail in spectacular ways under sustained write.

But what do I know, I am just a grumpy old man who remembers when "enterprise" meant something. Enjoy your space heater collection.

They idle at 65W for a full chassis with two CPUs, 64GB, and fans. Show me a newer platform that beats that at $45 all-in. A single Ryzen 5000 board costs more than three of these complete.

The PM863a is rated at 1.3 DWPD for five years. I am not running a database, I am running stateless containers and a backup target. Read-intensive is exactly what I need. Power-loss protection is handled by the RAID controller's cache backup, which I did not mention because it is obvious to anyone who has actually deployed this stuff.

You want to spend $800 on a NUC, be my guest. I will keep my space heaters.