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Advice on picking an affordable hosting provider for a low budget project.
AleksaDjordjic
Member
I'm currently looking over all the options for hosting a couple of apps and services that I need.
If anyone has good recommendations for providers that fit my needs for possibly better price or quality, pointing them out would help a lot.
So far, here is what I need hosted:
- MongoDB
- Custom HetrixTools Proxy
- Teleport Host
Pterodactyl Panel
- Which will also requires MySQL
An ASP.Net Website
Some things to note about how much use each one will be needy:
I'm not planning on storing a lot of data in the database, ~5-10GB max, and that database will be used for almost everything. Storing all the data generated as well as moving all of the in-memory cache that ASP.Net has by default (for sessions and such) to it. That means it will probably be accessed quite a bit. (And preferably will be on the same machine, or internal network as the proxy & website)
The "Custom HetrixTools Proxy" is a quick app that I put together that works with a modified HetrixTools agent to recieve its data, store it in that Mongo database, and just forward the original request back to HetrixTools. It will be monitoring ~10-15 servers.
Teleport is just so that I can SSH into servers while also disabling their sshd service. Bit of peace of mind for me knowing SSH is disabled... kind of... Won't be anything intensive.
About Pterodactly, I've noticed that it can use quite a bit of CPU when looking at server graphs. Especially if the panel itself is inside of Docker and behind NGINX. Having one tab with graphs open can use ~10-25% of a Xeon core (E5-2680 v2 specifically) when inside of Docker and behind NGINX. I'm not sure if its a configuration problem and I messed something up or is that really how intensive it is, but I'd like to be prepared for the worst. I'm not expecting a lot of people to be looking at graphs, especially not often, but lets say ~5-10 at the same time is what I'm aiming to handle. And that is probably once or twice a week, when we're messing with servers for fun.
Since the panel needs MySQL, that would be a considerable RAM requirement.
Finally, a website built in ASP.Net - Its nothing special, but the login requires a bit of CPU power, takes ~0.2 seconds on a 5900X (maxing it in the process) if that is any metric to go by... ~6-8 seconds on 1 vCore E5-2680 v2. And the rest of the site, while parts of it are static pages, some handle a bit of logic that takes time to compute, would be nice to just have that time cut down, even tho not many people will be constantly using it. Probably ~20-50 people total visiting not quite often (less than once a day).
Oh also I'll be using Ubuntu 20.04 or Debian 10.
What I've come up so far:
1. Contabo VPS S
I initially thought of a single Contabo VPS S for everything, but after seeing benchmarks, and running some of my own, seems like its a luck of the draw to get on a node where having 4 cores actually feels like you have 4 cores instead of 1 displayed as 4...
Looks like a Hetzners CPX11 instance almost matches the VPS S (in raw CPU) for a lower price.
2. Hetzner Cloud
So my next thought was using Hetzner Cloud, which went like this
1x CX11 - MongoDB, Teleport, Monitoring Proxy
20TB of traffic and 2GB is more than enough for all of this, and it should have enough resources for everything else. Only worrying thing is 20GB of storage, with the OS and everything else installed I'm probably looking at ~12-8GB left.
1x CPX11 - Pterodactly, MySQL, Website
Having an extra core will help with the website, but I don't really need the 40GB storage here, would be better if it was on the CX11 instance 
RAM should be fine-ish, but if its not, a CX21 or CPX21 will suffice.
Doing it like this (over 2 machines) means if the website or panel get abused, ddosed, or whatever else is possible, the core stuff I need, which is Teleport and monitoring is still working fine on another box.
This would end up costing exactly 6 EUR which seems reasonable. (7.5 EUR with CX21, and 9.5 EUR with CPX21 which is starting to be bit too much)
Also if I ever need to scale up in the future, should be easy, its the famous "cloud"
3. Prepaid-Hoster.de
I've just discovered about Prepaid-Hoster.de trough this forum, they seem to be a Hetzner reseller which provides OpenVZ VPS and KVM Rootservers (Hybrids, dedicated Core) and the benchmarks seem promising.
I was thinking about putting everything on one server, just like I would on Contabo, but now on either:
4 vCore, 4GB, 50GB SSD for 5.81 EUR a month - Only downside being OpenVZ but should be fine for my use case
Or
4 Core, 4GB, 50GB NVMe SSD for 9.95 EUR a month - Benchmarks people posted here and some that I found elsewhere seem AMAZING for the price.
Your opinions?
Are any of those 3 ideas good, or do you know a better way to handle this?
Any thought provoking comment or possibly a recommendation would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks for reading this hell of a long post (if you did) and thanks for the help in advance!
- Pick your answer:18 votes
- First one - Contabo VPS S11.11%
- Second one - CX11 and CPX1127.78%
- Third one - Prepaid-Hoster.de OpenVZ VPS0.00%
- Third and a half one - Prepaid-Hoster.de K22.22%
- None of those, I've got a better one22.22%
- Wh... what?16.67%
Comments
The end is nigh.
Hmmm
https://tenor.com/view/homer-simpson-homer-disappears-bush-hiding-gif-3377649
Contabo , just ask them to change you to a different node
I still can't really be sure that the new one won't become crowded like the last one can I...
But if they do actually allow switching nodes on request, hmm, interesting, that is neat.
Afaik they also have IO limits which can be quickly lifted by opening a ticket, which is nice - If you don't need better speeds you won't notice, and if you do and know about this, enjoy actual SSD speeds ¯_(ツ)_/¯
The limit is disk not IO, IO has a hard cap at 1.3k
I hear EntryBytes kvm vps with guaranteed memory is pretty decent for budget for folks who aren't hogging cpu
Hm, the Entry-6G would suit me well actually, nice prices, will consider.
Quick edit:
Found some conflicting information on the website
The Europe VPS, VPS-2G says its 1 vCPU but when you go to configure its actually 2 vCPU ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Hetzner
I'm a HC fan so I'd say go with HC servers.
I'd advise against putting everything on one server at any case, be it HC or any other provider.
Re: potential disk space issue for MongoDB, you could use LVM and a 20 GB volume but the cost savings would be EUR 0.2 and volumes aren't local storage so won't be as fast so in this case another CPX11 would be fine. It is worth testing if MongoDB will be impacted _significantly _ with volume storage or not as it could be useful for larger dbs.
MySQL should be on its own VM too but at this point I don't think you need that.
So two CPX11 and private network and firewall in HC would be my advice.
If storage does become a problem, I think I'll just upgrade it to CPX11, by the way, you can upgrade CX11 to CPX11, right? When you are on CX, you are locked to just CX or it can go to CPX?
About MySQL, yeah, its just for the panel, will be more than fine here.
And about private networks, I remember asking their support a while back, is it possible to block all public access to the cloud instance and make it only accessible to other cloud instances?
I think the answer was yes, but just wanna double-check if you might know as well.
Yes, but you will need a firewall with no inbound rules defined (so all inbound traffic is dropped) and another one for at least one machine so you can reach the other machine using the private IP (all private network traffic is allowed).
So:
Firewall 1 (no inbound rules defined): this is associated with any VM that doesn't need to be accessible to the internet.
Firewall 2 (has an SSH port and other ports you need to expose): this is associated with any VM that need to be accessible from the internet.
Html monster strikes again. Thanks. Will get the homepage updated