Comment by saidinesh5
15 hours ago
Out of curiosity, what advantages do the small VPS hosts offer compared to the big 3 (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud)? Customer Service? Pricing? Local Data Center?
15 hours ago
Out of curiosity, what advantages do the small VPS hosts offer compared to the big 3 (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud)? Customer Service? Pricing? Local Data Center?
Until recently I had a 4gb ram 80gb ssd+2tb hd VPS running debian in a Montreal data centre with a real use 700 mbit pipe to my city with a budget provider for the equivalent of $80USD/year. When fio speeds were slow they moved me to a less crowded server. I gave it up as don't need it and moved my personal sites back to NFS for peanuts a year and services to my NAS. The pricing, offsite storage for my backups, Canadian sovereignty, lack of perceived complexity with a big provider was all attractive. I'm a physician with a tech hobby and last serious tech work was in the LAMP days with perl and php. Trying to think of learning about AWS and screwing up usage based billing was daunting!
Yeah, don't try AWS. I tried it once and now I'm stuck with $0 bill emails coming each month that I can't stop.
A few months ago I was going through my secondary email and noticed I was getting a $0.01 monthly bill from AWS.
Having not used AWS for years, I logged in to check it out, navigated through the Kafkaesque maze of their services until I found what I was looking for:
A lone S3 storage bucket, with one file, "Squirrel.jpg". A 200kB picture of a squirrel that I uploaded 8 years ago and can't remember why.
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AWS did some weird security thing and it invalidated my 2FA. I can't login to my account to update my expired card.
I have $6 in charges and so now my account is locked. Lol. Fuck off AWS.
> Trying to think of learning about AWS and screwing up usage based billing was daunting!
One of the hard rules we learned pre-pandemic was that services attached to usage based billing should really exit on error. It's a lesson I'm keeping in mind working with agents and routing (and the main reason I'm local-first).
Canadian here, could you share the name of the provider? I'd love to move to something more local and just need a basic small vps for a simple apache host. I know of a couple providers but never talked to anyone actually using one.
I did a detailed review of a few Canadian VPS providers last year.
https://lukecyca.com/2025/canadian-vps-review.html
Last year, I moved from DigitalOcean to FullHost (their Vancouver datacentre) for hosting a small SaaS and a bunch of personal projects. It's cheaper and FAR better performance.
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It was ServaRICA as someone else suggested. It was a Black Friday hybrid VPS deal from a few years ago, looks like they still have comparable stuff on their site. For the cost I would generally assume anything important needs to be duplicated in case the company folds or a fire unless you pay them for such a service. (I don't have any vested interest in suggesting them.)
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They're probably talking about ServaRICA. They post deals on LowEndTalk.
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Much better prices, and simplicity. The power you get from Hetzner or Kimsufi is crazy compared to AWS.
If I need to host something small, I don’t want to mess around with the many permissions and quirks that are required to deal with AWS. It is often much easier to just setup the server on a standalone service.
This.
When I worked at Microsoft, I seldom used Azure for personal use due to it being expensive and complicated.
Whereas I have plenty of Fourplex.net servers because even on half the salary, it's affordable enough for 16 Tor exit relays and two personal web/email/Mastodon servers.
How's the legal exposure of running 16 exit relays?
Most of my customers (small VPS host here) don't like the companies behind AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, especially the amount of influence they have in the world and how they wield it. And the pricing often isn't that much different between a small VPS host and either a cloud provider or one of the larger VPS providers (Akamai/Linode, Digital Ocean, etc.) - larger providers have economies of scale, but smaller providers don't have as much overhead for paying sales and C-suite.
There's also the human touch in terms of who you talk to: a lot of the smallest VPS hosts are 1-2 people, both technical, so customer support = sysadmin = contact for everything.
A fixed plan that is not so flexible, not pay-as-you-go, but predictable and economical. Elastic cloud are elastic in terms of that you can change the compute you want, you can change the storage, either block or object, and you can use their premium network as much as you can, long as you have the money and got clearance on the end of the month. Scaling is therefore what those elastic cloud offers, albeit in a premium price.
Meanwhile, small service providers might not actually need those premium features, and just want something that is cheap and makes economical sense. They don't need the state-of-the-art hardware and just want something that works.
That's why while the AAGO (AWS, Azure, GCP and Oracle) attracted a lot of big corpo, that is, almost all of Forbes 500s used them, DigitalOcean and Vultr, with their $5 plan, is those who won the small businesses.
If the only thing you need is "server, accessible via the internet, always online", and you're not interested in all the vendor lock-in masquerading as useful services offered by the big cloud providers, then small VPS hosts are 100% the way to go. For mid-sized servers they're cheaper (i.e., stuff that wouldn't be free on the big clouds, but not "I want a petaflop"), with more transparent pricing (I pay $12, every month. If I get inundated with traffic, I'll get cut off until I choose to pay more).
If you need a lot of power you should also look into dedicated servers from small hosts, they usually have very good power to cost ratios.
The set of companies that sell VPS and the set of companies that sell dedicated servers aren't the same set.
I could pay like 30 bucks a month for an absolutely overspecc'd VPS (64GB/16c) that would cost around 20X on AWS (According to ChatGPT; which sounds about right based on the last time I cared to even look into it)
Does it have a billion 9's of reliability? No, but I don't care, it has literally never not worked when I've used it
Customer Service so far has been human, but that will vary greatly for the provider
I also use a different provider for work related hosting, and the reduced latency of being within 20 ms of the DC has been probably the single biggest (perceived) perf improvement my users have ever seen, specially on the legacy webforms platform we recently decomissioned (We're a bit too geographically far for most Datacenters of most large providers)
I'd use digital ocean over AWS for any SMB or lean startup (so... anyone not attached to an infinite money hose that has to either scale to NEED AWS, or die trying) just because of 1) their UI not being broken glass you have to crawl over and 2) not having eight trillion features that make doing simple things hard and 3) pricing
Same. For small projects, I always recommend Vultr or Digital Ocean. Vultr has some neat network features, like BGP support.
Price. 1 vCore, 2GB RAM, 20GB SSD, unlimited traffic (though throttled to 200mbit/s after transferring 2TB within 24 hours) = 1.85€
That is a nice way to have a static IP on the internet and enough resources to do small things like host a nameserver and/or OpenVPN/Wireguard.
I may have had 4 hours of downtime in one year, always announced days in advance.
I used a vps service hosted in a country with strong digital privacy laws to host a personal wireguard+pihole vpn. I could probably think up a decent argument why that privacy with the smaller guy was only nominal but I could absolutely think up a good argument why doing that on a big name would have no privacy guarantees at all, especially as someone who would be in the bottom rung payment-wise.
Never had problems with downtime and I payed, like, 40 bucks a year over 3 years. I think I had to restart the thing once because of something dumb I did on my end.
Low cost, simplicity and customer service.
AWS does offer Lightsail which is similar pricing.
The terms of use of Lightsail say you can't use it in a way that's intended to reduce your costs over EC2. So they have more free bandwidth, but you're not allowed to intentionally send your traffic through Lightsail to avoid the extortion of EC2 bandwidth pricing. They have cheaper CPU, but you're not allowed to use 100% of your CPU.
Very much like a similarly priced VPS though. It lets me persuade people to use a VPS because it is from a familiar big brand. I have come across a lot of people who use EC2 (usually just a single instance) when a VPS would work fine for them.
You cannot use Lightsail to work around EC2 costs, but you can use Lightsail instead of using EC2.
There are ones that don’t price gouge you on bandwidth.
Much cheaper. The big 3 are costing you as if it's still 2009, and they don't change this because people have an irrational attachment to overpaying.
The only advantage is cheapness, for personal use.
If you’re a government agency or a company you don’t care about saving $14/month, you want a secure provider. And these hosts are not secure, you’re basically just on your own.
Without hiring/being a cloud expert, it's hard to be sure that you didn't leave some door wide open due to a configuration error. Both approaches offer more than enough opportunities to royally screw up.
If you're a government agency or anyone for whom a security failure costs more than sending an apology letter, you should really have your equipment in a locked rack, if not on prem.
Speaking for myself, managing a team of 3, the simpler management interface on Hetzner compared to AWS is a major professional advantage.
Not being US owned can be an important one in this geopolitical climate.
Small VPS hosts oversell like crazy and they offer much lower prices. Also their reliability might be worse, because they don't migrate VM between hosts.
AWS EC2 does not migrate between hosts - They want you to pay more for redundancy, and they encourage you to use all the tools (paying for every single byte processed or transferred, of course). And if it is goes down, it is because you didn't follow AWS best practices (= paying even more)
Some. Depends on your needs though, and the provider. You can get shit performance for cheap, you can also get good performance for cheaper than AWS.
Spending caps is the biggest reason for me. Granted, some VPS don't offer this (vital!) feature, but none of the big 3 or similar services do.
10-100x cheaper
Where small VPS hosts can make a difference: require no KYC, accept crypto payments.
Some, but those are usually much more expensive to make up for the legal risk because half of their customers are doing something illegal.
Illegal according to whom? The servers are usually located in places where things such as sharing music, copyrighted or not under U.S. law, is not illegal.
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Simplicity, price, stability.
Others have mentioned the general pricing, simplicity etc.
Outbound data pricing is a potentially huge saving.
AWS is as much as $90/TB outbound with 1GB free. Hetzner is $1.20/TB (in EU and US) with 1TB/20TB (US/EU) free.
(Good) Smaller places are more likely to have actual technical staff you can talk to.
I have a dedicated server at one provider with $0.30/TB overage, and it's that cheapest I've ever seen. This provider appears to optimize for bandwidth–heavy use, advertising their connectivity heavily.
I like Vultr for the simplicity of my own projects. I really hate spending my time on provisioning and similar labyrinths.
Pricing (both cheaper and more predictable), and reduced complexity.
This is why I moved off of Azure and over to Hetzner's US VPS's. For what I was deploying (a few dozen websites, some relatively complex .NET web apps, some automated scripts, etc.), the pricing on Azure just wasn't competitive. But worse for me was the complexity; I found that using Azure encouraged me to introduce more and more complex deployment pipelines, when all I really needed was Build the container -> SCP it into a blue/green deployment scheme on a VPS -> flip a switch after testing it.
Interesting. I'd have thought these giants would have better pricing because of the scale...
The last comparison I did was Hetzner offers 14x the performance per dollar
Not including the faster SSD & included traffic
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Quite the opposite. They have mindshare lock–in and don't face competitive pressure to reduce prices. AWS boasts it never increased prices but it also never reduced them by much, even as hardware got an order of magnitude cheaper.
They might be if they were trying to compete on price. But my understanding is their margins are... healthy shall we say.
They're selling all their capabilities; using them as a VPS is like using a battleship to cut cheese.
But if all you really do with cloud stuff is "ssh into a server I have" (which covers a ton!) then you'll find much cheaper/more performant elsewhere.
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They give potentially worse pricing on a lot of the basic things (egress bandwidth, basic VM hosting, storage pricing) because their real value-add are all the extra managed services they offer on top of those things, the scale they're able to offer, and the more enterprise features.
If you're using AWS/GCP/Azure to just host a couple of VMs for a small group you're massively overpaying.
I haven't been professionally involved in AWS in some time, and never was involved in pricing.
Personally, the only thing I know of that is a true deal vs. competition is cold storage of data. Using the s3 glacier tiers for long term data that is saved solely for emergencies is really cheap, something like $1/100GB a month or less.
AWS is usually not the cheapest EVER when it comes to offerings like EC2. If you aren't doing cloud-native or serverless at AWS, you're probably spending too much.
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They don't. AWS is the most expensive hosting provider in the world.
AWS outbound data is as much as 75x the cost of eg Hetzner.
I view a large percentage of "cloud" usage like Teslas stock price: it's completely detached from reality by people who have drunk the kool aid and can't get out.
Predictable and extremely low costs for less critical stuff. My 2 main ones are respectively around 4 and 8 EUR per _year_.
I use them to run wireguard to evade geoblocks when I'm travelling, a few redundant monitoring scripts alerting me of reachability issues of more critical stuff I care about, they serve as contingency access channels to my home (and home assistant) if my primary channels are down.
I get no support, no updates, it's all on me - which is fine, it allows me to stay current and not lose hands-on practice on skills which I anyway need for my job (and which are anyway my passion). I don't even get an entire IPv4 - I get.... 1/3000th of it? (21 ports, the rest are forwarded to other customers). Suits me fine.
And it's always that price, apart from bandwidth overage on some but not all providers.
Simplicity, and low price.
VPS services are usually really, really simple and fairly cheap.
I'd say that actually VPS prices is where we actually see computing prices going down rather than on the big 3.
AWS used to optimize further and pass down the savings to the customers back in the day, now they don't do it anymore.
Pricing mostly, and also simplicity. Big cloud is incredibly expensive when you really look at it. The markup is huge.
It’s weird because in most of this industry scale results in lower prices. Not in cloud.
Pricing. They overprovision aggressively but most people actually just need a 0.1 CPU available remotely for the majority of their use cases.
I replaced with a home server and it costs way more just in power hahaha.
Not being Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
I moved from AWS to Hetzner, because: 1. lower prices, 2. not American