I wrote a very slow, good citizen DHT scraper the other day to do some research and the second I spun it up on a Hetzner box I got an email from them that summarized as "For real, bro? Computer says no."
They actually look into the stuff you put on the computer? That's even worse than I thought. I did get a strong feeling of distrust towards their customers when I tried to sign up but because of that I never went ahead with the deal. Dodged a bullet, clearly.
They just look at the traffic coming and going. I have a bunch of Hetzner boxes for different web projects that I've had forever and never heard a peep from them.
DHT is the protocol for P2P BitTorrent metadata transfer, essentially. It sorta lets you bootstrap a BitTorrent download without having a centralized tracker site. I'm trying to find a list of torrents for a research project and I need to monitor a lot of DHT traffic to see what is out there.
Ps not doing anything illegal but I just don't like having copies of my ID everywhere. Too much data getting leaked these days. With Scaleway you just pay with your card and that's it.
Scaleway is on a bit more expensive side of things
Scaleway does have every primitive you might need but I don't know how good scaleway's support system is.
I have tried Upcloud for free and they are more expensive but they offer unlimited bandwidth (and the cap after 24 TB of free bandwidth/month is at 100 mbps)
Personally it depends on the solution, I have evaluated tons of servers and Scaleway's 0.10cents per month or 3 years per month for 1 gig 1 gb server is the cheapest for the smallest amount of resources needed
That being said, I personally prefer OVH as well. I have heard that their support can be shit but they are much more lenient than hetzner but their support is heard at times to be rough (someone recommended here to go talk on twitter to them if you want concerns solved as well and they have discord too so I guess)
But even after all of this, Hetzner's especially auction box are the king of undisputed prices and I am telling you after creating scripts scraping lowendtalks and many other things. There are some other options but none provide the safety of well founded company like hetzner (in terms of uptime etc.) and hetzner's pretty cool
They can be the very best (for some purposes they already are) but for the purposes of hosting other people's stuff or building own server on, they aren't so good because I think hetzner follows a strict policy.
Personally I am on netcup, I somehow looped it in such a way to get server of 8 gigs 4 core cpu 500 gb for 8$ / 3 months. I don't really use that server (too much or even barely, I have to give my brother access to that server so that he can run supabase on it because my servers literally empty aside from some basic stuff), I think at this point, these companies actively lose money for sure if I actually use what I own a decent amount of degree.
VPS/Cloud business is really fascinating ngl. I feel like though for some average use cases for which people used to buy 3$ servers for sprites.dev/exe.dev and now shellbox.dev are gonna be even cheaper (I thought about shellbox.dev and being honest, if I was capable to get hetzner auctions I would've done the same and there must be a middleman and they are more open about things as well and a lot of decisions are same of what I would've built)
Yup So I am probably throwing my full weight behind shellbox.dev as someone who wanted to build a cloud sometime ago. I got the idea of building cloud because I wanted to build something like this and none existed so I went into the rabbit hole but now its built. Now I can go the layer up that I wanted to in the first place now that this primitive has been built (an open source cloud solution where people can pay x$ to get access to a primitive like this)
I think I ended up building my own firecracker based (bottlefire) + ssh/golang based in the end for personal use and I will have it open source in the future (its really simple) and I hope that shellbox.dev can host it as well.
Honestly, we are seeing a lot of products in this space so lets hope that the best one wins! (I always appreciate competition)
> Scaleway is on a bit more expensive side of things
I don't agree. They're a lot cheaper than Amazon. And they don't charge all these hidden fees like ingress bandwidth for their compute services. Their glacier is also a ton cheaper than Amazon's (it does charge transfer fees but that's part of the model). I have 3 VPSes (stardust) for 9 euros a month, it's pretty ideal for me. They're in 3 countries too (you can only get 1 stardust per datacenter)
> Scaleway does have every primitive you might need but I don't know how good scaleway's support system is.
I have not had issues with them for years. But a few years back you could just contact them on slack and they would respond quickly. None of that hassle with creating tickets and CS agents deflecting because they're lazy or don't know. One time there was a recurring random issue and they just plainly told me "we know this particular service keeps having random issues, we'll discontinue it soon, much better to use this one instead".
This was really impressive. I work at work with the big tech names and they would never admit random instability issues like that. And they would never admit that one of their services is less than perfect. Probably because they're afraid someone will post it online and it'll cause a big fuss and requests for refunds. However I don't care about their reasoning. But these guys just plain told me what was up. It gives me a lot of trust, which I don't get from a party like Microsoft or AWS. They outsource their support to companies that outsource it again themselves and the resulting agents have no more knowledge than the kbase you can look up yourself.
So yeah I'm impressed. Not sure if their support is still like this because it's been rock-steady for years now.
> Personally it depends on the solution, I have evaluated tons of servers and Scaleway's 0.10cents per month or 3 years per month for 1 gig 1 gb server is the cheapest for the smallest amount of resources needed
No you can get IPv4 but you pay for it. This is the main cost of my stardust instances, about 3 euro per month including VAT. I don't use much IPv6 myself so I need it and it's not bad. That 3 bucks per VPS is nothing and it performs great. I really get a lot of use out of them.
> That being said, I personally prefer OVH as well. I have heard that their support can be shit but they are much more lenient than hetzner but their support is heard at times to be rough (someone recommended here to go talk on twitter to them if you want concerns solved as well and they have discord too so I guess)
OVH are really cowboys.. The fire in that datacenter exposed a lot of practices that really really should never have happened in a sane company.
And yes Hetzner is the king of power for the buck (if you need 24/7), that is true, especially baremetal if you don't mind your server being a few generations old.
PS: There's also the free server thing from Oracle of course. If you don't mind doing business with them. I do absolutely mind so that was not an option for me.
But I use my VPSes for constantly running stuff so one that goes on standby is simply not an option.
