Comment by IgorPartola
1 day ago
Some of these are resellers. Big provider sells them a package of 10-1000 VPSs and they set up websites to sell them to you. But you can also find lots of direct deals as well. BuyVM famously has their $15/year deal on a 1GB VPS. You can also often find dedicated servers for like $25/month. I recently bought a $75 lifetime deal on some email hosting for up to 25 domains and I think 250GB storage. Great for some secondary domains and such that I use. There are some real gems out there and you should see their Black Friday threads. Kind of a wild place.
There are lots of even cheaper deals than buyvm usually with racknerd and dedirock. Black friday deals are absolutely amazing but always go with someone a bit more reputed and Buyvm's an amazing choice too although they would be considered "pricey" in comparison to someone (just a few $'s) (I have joined their discord server)
I think racknerd recently did a 6.85$ or similar deal but the point of these deals become is that they become insanely overprovisioned and it becomes a showpiece of sorts "look what deal I got ;P" kinda not sure.
I think another fascinating deal about lowendtalk is that man those people have this faith in small hosting providers and giving chances to them etc. hoping that they become big as well. There are very few places like lowendtalk on the internet. I find a lot of similarities with the hackernews culture although more focused on deals/hosting although its definitely more casual than hackernews.
The weird thing is that it seems like some people are almost addicted to buying these boxes and I am not sure if the use cases. It almost has a feeling of gambling.
I used to get boxes from there for a specific product I had (ability to ping from multiple places around the globe to see what your latency was like) and one provider did burn me but the rest were pretty great.
I just wish more of them provided a proper native IPv6 stack. Still can’t understand why this isn’t standard for all.
> The weird thing is that it seems like some people are almost addicted to buying these boxes and I am not sure if the use cases. It almost has a feeling of gambling.
Oh boy I had thought about this too. There are only quite a few uses of the completely cheap one. Perhaps for the chinese people, it acts as a VPN
Like I thought about the use cases and they were hard for me to find when you consider all the "free" stuff that's launched too. I think to me, some aspects of lowend are for the novelty factor (oh a 2$ 1TB server sign me up!) and what ends up happening is that I didn't really use the storage much so my opinion was nice whereas someone else who used it said that, it's a bad deal
You are right about this though, but still its just fascinating to find the deals and then like the fact is, they are still pretty small and you can just go talk to them and I think this customization and more discussion (hey does your product allow my usecase) etc. are some few reason
I once asked on the forum why they aren't using hetzner,upcloud etc. and someone replied with the fact that they want to make the small one win.
I don't think its completely gambling but you may end up buying something that you don't need much (I ended up with a netcup 8 gig server I guess) in a similar way. But now I kind of know that beating hetzner,ovh, (upcloud's more expensive) is possible perhaps but that if you want ton of servers fast and cheap, there is a possibility but I might still recommend companies like hetzner,ovh,upcloud etc. for any professional use, its just I would be thrown less under the bus as compared to if I have somebody idk set up in dedirock
One of the reasons why I stopped frequenting lowendtalk, might go next black friday perhaps but I don't even know, like there are tons of services now which can offer vm's cheap and fast and just similar to what you might buy from that. There are tons of these I use so I don't really know if buying cheap servers might make sense
One of the reasons I (liked?) the idea of buying cheap servers is that one can always scale when needed and they could then use something like these lowendproviders instead of vercel who initially might be free but then is super expensive. But I think that we are seeing some options which are free but not gonna be super expensive or that expensive perhaps.
The thing is, to me, its nice knowing a place like lowendtalk exists. I might go into its rabbit hole again or not I guess but I don't really know.