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Ultra lowend VPS
We had the discussion before about "how low can you go" dealing with decreasing the need for RAM on a VPS.
Afaik we never had any discussion if it would be nice to have small offers for purposes like VPN-gateway or static websites etc. that just use s small amount of RAM.
For example: I have a few VPS where I just use about a fraction of the available RAM. (Between 10-50 MB) It would be nice if there would be some small offers around $1/month that have specs like: 32-64MB RAM, 5GB disk, 20 GB traffic. That would be fully enough for my VPN-gateway, dns-server and static webserver.
Comments
Only if the providers have free IP's from their datacenter, which is complicated. Otherwise, $1/month is almost unsustainable
We did this for awhile (still doing, actually). We got a LOT of business from it, even to the point where we needed to lease another /24 block of IPs from our datacenter. I'm not sure why more companies don't offer a really low end package. I'm guessing they don't want to appear like they're not serious? About the only issue we had was that we had a few bad eggs using them for malicious purposes.
$1/month doesn't make sense for the providers because of the transaction costs.
Amazon Simple Pay makes that a possibility now at 5% + .05c, if only more could use it.
Paypal Micropayments has the same rate, which is what we're using.
@Damian4IPXcore,
Send a link with PM please, cannot find it on your site.
Or post it here. I don't think that anybody will be against it.
Or post it here. I don't think that anybody will be against it.
As long as the pricing is within LEB guidelines it should be no problem. I am wondering about updating though. Yum and apt-get, etc... can use quite a bit of memory when updating.
I ended up PM'ing him, just to be safe. Anyway, it's on the second page of LEB.com right now.
Our plan is 96mb. apt-get usually doesn't have issues with this amount. Yum has issues with running out of memory on an initial update, and can be resolved by either stopping services that aren't massively necessary like sendmail or xinetd, or disabling the fastestmirror plugin. Yum usually works normally on consecutive updates.
That would make sense. I would not want to run a mail program on 96 mb anyways. Seems like that alone would eat a lot of the available resources and not leave much for anything else.
Are you able to use it for all payments under a certain amount then flip to straight paypal on amounts over?
I have seen 48mb plans somewhere.
Yes and no. Paypal doesn't allow you to have different payment types on the same account, but they allow you to have multiple accounts. Not a big deal.
Unfortunately, we're using WHMCS for invoicing/billing, which doesn't have any kind of function for changing payment gateways when a product is over a certain amount. Adam has been poking at WHMCS in the "feature request" part of their forums, but I'm not sure if it'll ever get implemented.
32 and 64MB OpenVz plans at https://securedragon.net/openvz.php
I see KuJoe is now offering a full core on all plans. Guess I'll have to drop them a note to get my 1/2 core upgraded
I like their plans but I don't want to compromise one full year. And the monthly invoices aren't cheap (O96B).
In addition to static websites, on a Debian system you can run nginx, php-fpm and sqlite on a 32MB OpenVz server -- along with dropbear, syslogd and crond -- and still have room to do an apt-get update/upgrade (as long as your PHP apps aren't sucking large amounts of memory). I have a local container doing that and it runs & updates just fine.
Forget CentOS. yum will die a quick death.
I think annual billing is the only way it'll work from the provider's perspective.
So, from the consumers perspective it's gotta be from a reputable provider. Not the next $1/month wonder on LEB.
Nice offers, indeed. Since you seem to be using them: Is TUN/TAP or PPPTP available?
Nice, so there are at least two offers available.
Dunno. Never asked Though looking though the comments on some of their posts on LEB it seems these things are enabled on request.
SecureDragon are really a very solid company catering to the very lowend market. Following my post above, I did open a ticket asking for that CPU upgrade. 45 minutes after submitting the ticket I got a reply:
And it is (upgraded). Is that nice or what?
Edit:
Nevermind i mixed Securedragon up with Cripperz.
What kind of abuses? Proxy?
Anyway, I guess that the people on very low end VPS use just a little bit of ressources? (Fran' advice would be interesting too)
No, we allow secure proxies, and we've actually built a good client base just on that.
What we've had problems with is mostly robomail or qmail setup as remote smtp for spamming purposes, and script kiddies with their "Router Stress Test" scripts saturating our uplink.
Extremely low-RAM VPSes are a thing of the past, from the times when RAM was expensive and there was a fairly low limit of total RAM in a server. Nowadays other factors are more limiting, like the IPv4 cost, I/O contention, even CPU. You can quite easily get a 32 GB of RAM, but that probably doesn't mean you can put 500+ of 64 MB VPSes onto one box.
Unfortunately the payment fees are what prevent us from offering plans monthly. Here's an example with Paypal for a VPS that costs $1/month:
(1.00 - 2.9% - 0.30)12 = $8.05/year
12.00 - 2.9% - 0.30 = $11.35/year
So you can see that for the same exact VPS, if we sold it for $1/month we would lose almost $4 to Paypal. Now if you didn't want external access (i.e. no bandwidth or IP) we might be able to work something out with you for $1/month.
TUN/TAP is available, we do not support PPTP at this time.
Did you open a ticket with us? I don't see anything pending.
Thanks @KuJoe.
I must confess that I regret when I returned my 12/year box when you started to offer here in LEB u_u
And well, for my needs I need networking, hehe :P
Sorry my bad, that VPS was actually with Cripperz (a company that i can't really recommend btw, they seem to have much downtime)
KuJoe's Securedragon is the lowest spec VPS i have ATM, and works fine. In the last months he upgraded nodes, speed, offered more resources but still keeping a healthy user base, so nodes are stable and not infested with torrenters/ircers/gamers and other trouble magnets. Got a xen and a openvz with him and both vps exceeded my expectations. i'd vote him the best startup in the VPS business of 2011.
Aren't they pretty much down right now w/o much of a word from the owner? There is a tweet from him amount abusers, etc, but that just means he isn't handling abuse complaints that come in.
Francisco
Well my server with them is up again but the 5$ saving in comparison to you lowest BuyVM server isn't really worth all the trouble.
ulimit -s 96
should solve some problems.
If I've got the NAT right this should work for you: demo.blite.ca.
32mb Deb 6 with nginx, php-fpm & sqlite. May be pokey as it's on a crowded ~500kbps DSL connection.