Member
Vultr takes XMR but not for the $2.50 plan. $3.50 minimum and they want account verification. RackNerd takes crypto through some processor, last I checked it was Coinbase Commerce so not exactly private
For actually anonymous yearly I use Hetzner auction (https://www.hetzner.com/sb) with XMR via a reseller. More steps but no KYC trail
Member
This is the math that hurts. My OVH was €39/3yr = €1.08/mo but only got 8 months. €1.08 * 8 = €8.64 effective per month of service. I could have had a proper Contabo 4GB for that.
The cheap trap is real.
I have a whole sheet for this now. Columns: provider, upfront, months survived, effective monthly, whether I migrated off or they died. 23 rows. 6 "died" including two "lifetime" deals.
The lifetime ones average 18 months. Worst was 7.
OVHcloud Gravelines fire took out my VPS in 2021. No refund, no migration path, just "we are sorry" for 3 weeks. That was €7/mo so not even cheap cheap. Still no trust.
I pay more now for geographically diverse. Vultr London + Amsterdam, same config, automated failover. Not cheap but I sleep.
Member
We lost two production boxes in that. Strasbourg survived but the redundancy we thought we had was both in France. Lesson learned hard.
Now we require different legal jurisdictions minimum. OVH London + Hetzner Nuremberg https://www.hetzner.com + something US. Platform team of four, we felt that fire personally.
Following this thread hard. My regret pile is shorter but growing.
Contabo Sydney is oversold to hell. I got 512MB there for testing and the disk IO was 12MB/s. My home fibre in Auckland beats it. Cancelled same month, ate the setup fee.
Vultr Sydney is fine but $6/mo. You get what you pay for I suppose.
Chorus fibre represent. I run 18 VMs on a NUC in my rack and the only reason I rent VPS at all is for NTP stratum 1 diversity. Contabo was 15ms offset during peak. Unacceptable.
Hetzner is 2-3ms. Vultr Sydney similar.
Only 18? Amateur. I have 22 on a NUC12, plus 4 on an old ThinkPad for "critical services" aka my Pi-hole backup.
The real regret is the electricity bill. VPS starts looking cheap at 35c/kWh.
Does anyone use Hetzner Cloud for actual production? The CX11 is €3.79/mo, no setup fee. Seems too cheap to be real compared to AWS.
