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Need a Storage VPS I Can Keep Forever (6–12 TB, Cheap, Disk Ownership)
DeadlyChemist
Member
Hey,
We (as a household) need some kind of storage server (VPS or similar) that we can keep running basically indefinitely. We’re totally fine committing to 3 years. The key point: we want to own the disks.
Our current setup:
- Home servers: one running TrueNAS, another running Proxmox
- A few cloud servers (including one dedicated), mostly Proxmox
- One solid backup server at my mom’s place
- A few other small backup servers, including one at LevelOneServers (keeping that one, it’s €7/y)
- Two backup servers with HostBrr (one storage VPS, one running Proxmox Backup Server)
- I want to get rid of the HostBrr servers — not because they’re bad (I actually recommend HostBrr!)
(Mom’s backups stay, LevelOneServers stays.)
What we want
Very cheap monthly rent — ideally ~€5/mo, max €8/mo
Monthly or quarterly billing is fine (more on payment below).
Specs
- CPU: 2 good cores, or 4 meh ones
- 1× IPv4 with 4 free ports
- IPv6: welcome but not required
- RAM: 4 GB is fine, 6 GB would be nice
- Storage: 6–12 TB HDD (details below)
- Boot SSD: ~60 GB (just for software, doesn’t need to be fast)
- Availability: ~99% (max ~3.65 days downtime per year)
- Network: 1 Gbps or higher (shared). Bandwidth use will never exceed the disk size.
- If I ever need more BW, I’m happy to pay €1/TB overage.
- Support: doesn’t need to be fast; I can wait a few days. But please, not endless back-and-forth.
Payment
1. Monthly or quarterly upfront via PayPal, SEPA, or card.
2. I’m also happy to keep 3–6 months of credit on account.
3. If I somehow miss payments, I’ll pay a “ransom” for the data (all missed months + 10%).
4. If you go out of business: please ship the disks to me.
Location
- Anywhere, but Europe preferred.
Other requirements
- You must own the hardware (bonus if you also own the DC).
- You must have been in business for at least 3 years.
- Termination period: 24 months from both sides.
More info on disks
I will pay for the disks. Options:
- We agree on e.g. €50/mo plus X€/mo rent until the disks are fully paid off, then it drops to rent only.
- Or: we agree on rent, and I ship you the disks. I’ll pay for remote hands, replacements, etc.
If something we own breaks, we pay for the fix.
More info (v2)
We earn well and this goes on my dedicated “IT card,” which always has enough money for a few months. The problem isn’t money — it’s that migrations suck, monthly payments stack up, and sometimes life gets weird.
This year I was in the hospital twice (nothing serious, just unlucky). Before that, last time was 2016. I want a service I can pay for, dump my Proxmox backups to (PBS on the VPS), dump Duplicati backups to, and then just forget about it. My redundancy is backups at mom’s place.
Life took a bunch of turns and the last thing I want is backup stress. A few years ago I literally couldn’t sleep until new drives arrived… but for the last 2–3 years, no paranoia!
Who I’m not looking for
- No resellers.
- Not interested in Bakker-IT — I already have a dedi with him and don’t want all eggs in one basket and I’m too grateful to ask for more. (rick is a great guy)
- Not interested in Zappie — they already gave me a free upgrade and I’m too grateful to ask for more. (great people)
Please ping anyone you know who might be up for this.
I hope this pricing isn’t insane. I’ve seen $99/y dedis with bigger quantities than 3. I feel like I’m asking for less?, especially since I’m paying for the storage.
The server will run PBS and store a mix of Duplicati backups + PBS backups. Most files are encrypted (personal stuff, some projects, etc).
I originally planned to post this after BF but decided to do it now. If I don’t buy anything, I’ll probably ask again in January.
Best regards — feel free to slide into my DMs with an introduction 
(This was cleaned up by ChatGPT so it’s actually readable. DM for the original chaos.)
Comments
@UltraVPS had those offers in 2024 Black Friday
https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/199983/ultravps-black-friday-2024-25th-anniversary-special-offers
dont see anything about shipping/owning disks? where does it say that? also the price isnt what i asked for...
Sorry, I missed that part.
@layer7, maybe? This owning disks thing is not very possible in a hypervisor/RAID environment, no?
no clue, maybe there is something, i dont care about specs, a potato will run pbs and ssh backups... (and a status page)
owning disks would make it more or less legally binding to the provider...
i'll flip my shit if any more providers i use for prod or important backups will decomission my service or deadpool
im surely there is a way/agreement that can be made
If it breaks, they won't replace it.
check @labze HostBrr black Friday deals.
https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/212070/hostbrr-bf2025-deals-amd-threadripper-vps-15-year-1-tb-storage-just-1-month-more-inside/p1
https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/212070/hostbrr-bf2025-deals-amd-threadripper-vps-15-year-1-tb-storage-just-1-month-more-inside/p1
read my actual post, thanks
well, if my disks break and i'll pay for remote hands and new disk/whatever, i dont see why they wouldnt replace it
But:
that @ravi guy does not read, nor did he read
If they're bankrupt, your hard drive is getting sold too, no worries. No amount of legal paperwork can ensure ANYTHING, you need to trust the provider, and do your backups.
Hostbrr is not a reseller.
here in europe, if someone goes bankrupt, sure stuff can get mixed in with the pool, but from what i heard, getting stuff back, it's impossible or hard, just takes time
no clue how it works elsewhere
hence i ask on let lmao
i have backups, mostly, ish...
Hi,
thank you for the mentioning!
@DeadlyChemist the general issue here is actually an organizational one.
The product you ask for ( Shared Compute, dedicated/owned storage ) does not exist with providers. Simply because its too much hassle, especially if someone comes along with a 5-8 EUR/month price wish. While for you this 5-8 EUR might seem generous for some small spec server as you pay for the storage, for a provide it means:
he must stay compatible with your drives. So if what ever happens to the hardware ( CPU/Board/Controller/... ) the provider must stay compatible with your drives if he wants to replace the defective hardware. While this actually seems on first glance just annoying, the real hassle is actually keeping track of this. Imagine you have a server farm and one server needs to be replaced. There must be somewhere a big big red alert warning that in THIS specific server parts of the hardware actually does not belong to the provider. And this special treatment to monitor is f*** up and the consequence ( replacement hardware must be compatible to it ) is another f*** up.
Lets say you want your 6-12 TB and lets assume you want to use 4 disks for that as an example. Your 4 disks will not only block the available HDD slots in the chassis, it will actually lead to a situation where the whole serverfarm planning is going down the hill. Because every server in the farm is identical, because you are a smart hoster, and you know the street down to big f*** is to build up clusters from different hardware. So this one server will be the black sheep, building an imbalance. As a result, because the hoster can sell the full capacity of the CPU/RAM but not of the HDD because you block it with a bigger consume of HDD capacity and a tiny consume of CPU/RAM the provider will either have to accept that he will never be able to sell the remaining CPU/RAM resources OR he will make special deals with discounted servers with a lot of CPU/RAM but small amount of disk, to somehow rebalance the stuff ( which will only work on THIS special server/machine and you can just pray that this server will just never have any issues ).
i could continue, but then this wall of text will just get out of control and you will only hate me and anyway not read it.
The quint essence is that your nice generous 5-8 EUR are by far not enough to pay the providers nightmares he will get sooner or later with the special handling of this black sheep server you just laid in his beautiful pure basked of identical eggs that are usually nice to be managed.
But please allow me to ask the other way around:
What is your motivation that you want to punish your brand new provider like this? To make a product for you that will allow you to mix your hardware into shared hardware with all beautiful consequences?
What advantage do you think you will get from such a setup? Cost saving? Because you own the storage and dont need to pay for it? Or something else?
I'd be surprised (which I'm happy to be) if a provider would go through so much bending to accomodate this request. I'll keep on eye on this thread if that provider exists.
hey @layer7
nah i'll read, don't worry, no hate, we all humans trying to understand each other...
What is your motivation that you want to punish your brand new provider like this? To make a product for you that will allow you to mix your hardware into shared hardware with all beautiful consequences?
What advantage do you think you will get from such a setup? Cost saving? Because you own the storage and dont need to pay for it? Or something else?
saving monthly costs as well as getting some "insurance" because part of the hardware is mine. Plus 2 year termination period gives me more than enough time to figure something out.
I'm happy to pay for X drives and X setup, just keeping monthly costs minimal + knowing host aint going anywhere or he's shipping me drives.
I was hoping going this way would well, allow me to get that, but from what you are telling me that would fuck up a lot of stuff lol
for me it's uhhh, i'd throw old dell with 4x4tb drives or whatever into some corner and hook up internet to it.
I also was thinking to prepay 120 months on storage VPS but well, if the hoster goes missing i'm loosing money and my data
or if the hoster decides to cancel my plan (happened like 4 times over the last 5 years) then i'm getting 119 months in useless credits AND 29 days to migrate 6-12 tb
Do you have any idea for decent way of solving this? as worry free as possible?
The number 6-12tb is random due to uh, i have currently 3tb of proxmox backups (over months of incremental backups)
and we have about 2tb of personal data, which we dont even backup all of that, some data is fine not backed up at all or only backed up at moms place
I'm looking for a solution to my problem that accounts for getting hit by a car and beeing in hospital for a while and loosing a job and not beeing able to pay 30-40-50-60-70€ bill monthly while previnting the hoster as much as possible from fucking me over
(@layer7 oh and i appreciete the response, i work in IT field but not in DC, if we manage servers they are well different and not 394929402309x the same server, thanks for the insight!)
We want the original chaos!
Hey,
We (as household) need some storage server (vps) which we can keep running basically indefinetly (happy to commit to 3 years, no problem). We want to “own” the disks.
We have a home server (one running truenas, other running proxmox)
We have few cloud servers (including a dedicated one) most are running proxmox
We have 1 solid Backup server (at my moms place) we also have few other small backup server, one at leveloneservers which we’ll also keep
then we have 2 backup servers with hostbrr, one just a vps with storage and 2nd running promox backup server
I want to get rid off hostbrr, not because it’s bad, not because I don’t like hostbrr (I recommend hostbrr) we won’t get rid of mom’s backups and I most likely won’t get rid of leveloneservers (it’s $7/y)
We want very cheap monthly rent, about 10€ max, preferably around 5€/m
billed monthly/quarterly (more on payment later)
Specs:
2 good cores or 4 meh cores
1x ipv4 with 4 free ports
Ipv6 welcome but not required
4gb ram would be ok, wouldn’t complain about 6gb
6-12tb HDD (more on that later)
60gb boot ssd (whatever ssd to keep software on, don’t need speed)
availability 99% so 3.65 days per year max downtime
Network: 1gbe or preferably higher (shared) bw usage will never go past HDD size, should I need more BW I’m happy to pay overcharge fee of 1€/tb.
Support: good but can be slow, im happy to wait few days, but I don’t like back and forth for days.
Payment: im happy to pay monthly/quarterly upfront with paypal, sepa or card, I’m happy to keep 3-6 months of credits.
Should I not pay for any reason, I’ll pay ransom for the data (including 10% extra) basically all the months I didn’t pay, plus 10% extra
Should you go out of business, please pack and ship the disks to me
Location: anywhere, Europe preferred
Other requirements: you must OWN the hardware, +1 if you own the DC, you must have been in business for at least 3 years. If you want to terminate this deal, you must do so with with termination period of 24 months. If I want to terminate this deal, I must do so with termination period of 24 months.
More info:
I’ll pay for the disks, either we can agree on let’s say 50€/m plus X€ rent until the disks are paid off, then we drop back to only rent or we agree on X€ rent and I’ll ship you the disks, I’ll pay for remote hands etc. We’ll of course pay for any remote hands, new disks, and any other costs that may come future if something OURS breaks.
More info ^2:
We both earn well, the card/bank this would be put on I call my “IT card”, it always has enough money to cover for few months, the problem isn’t money, the problem is migrations are pain in the ass, monthly payments sum up and sometimes well one is unlucky and can’t pay (I have been this year twice in the hospital (nothing bad. Just unlucky), the last time I was in the hospital was 2016?). I want a service I can pay, dump my proxmox backups to (vps will run pbs) dump my duplicate backups to and forget/not worry. My redundancy is backups at my moms place.
My life took many turns and last thing I want to worry about backups, 2-3 years ago I couldn’t sleep for few days until new drives arrived… for the last 2-3 years however no paranoia!
Please ping some people you know that would be down, no ressellers. Not interested in Bakker-it, I have a dedi with him and don’t like all my eggs in the same basket (im super happy with him, he’s a good guy) and not interested in Zappie, they hooked me up with free upgrade and I’m too grateful to ask for more favors, they are good people.
I hope this pricing isn’t super insane, I have seen 99usd/y dedis… with bigger quanity then 3, im basically asking for way less? And will pay for storage.
The server will run PBS and it will store a mix of duplicate backups and PBS backups, most of the files will be encrypted (personal stuff, some projects etc)
I originally wanted to post this after BF but decided to do before.. should I not buy any solution, I’ll probably ask again around January.
best regards, feel free to slide into dms with introduction
(this has been cleaned up my chatgpt, so you can actually read my mess, feel free to dm for original)
np (yes i did change few things last second
It seems to me that you're right, but zfs.rent offers it. Personally I think they're very optimistic!
crazy actually exactly this exists, but yeah "$10/month/drive" is too pricy for me
>
I don't think there are anything to save by doing this. I think it would be the other way around, as a provider would require extra work to configure this for you. Not only the initial setup, but the non-standardized drives would require extra work during any maintenance.
And what if something breaks? The benefit of renting the hardware by the provider is two-fold. Firstly, a datacenter can typically purchase drives at a lower cost due to bulk orders and secondly they usually have spare drives at hand for fast replacement. What if your drive breaks and they do not have the same model at hand? If you ship them a spare drive then any cost-saving is already gone upfront.
The logistics nightmare for a provider is also the need to take a server offline for both adding your drives and for any potential replacement.
I doubt anyone large enough to own a datacenter would bother with this kind of setup for a few € per month. Perhaps if you rent a dedicated server some would let you do this, but then we are also talking entirely different costs.
Also, I've only been around here three or so years, but I've already seen more "owned hardware" providers get locked out of their datacenter due to unpaid bills than I can count on one hand.
Hi,
i think its a bit too optimistic to think that having a provider who has physical possession of your drives will save you from a situation where the provider will vanish.
If a provider vanishes ( deadpool/bankrupt/died on working too many tickets/burn out/what ever ) then he will usually not bother to forget about what ever hardware might be in his possession -- even its not his.
So i think you can really forget about this kind of security. Either you got a good responsible provider or not. If not then just see it as one factor of your datasecurity ( together with your data at home and at your mom's place and where ever else ). All factors have a chance to fail in one or another sense. Thats why we build up redundancy. Dont take anything for granted anywhere there.
That leaves back the prepayments because you might vanish and unable to pay because of what ever. You will not find easily providers who accept payments for > 3 years in advance AND being a serious provider. Simply because 3+ years is a timespan no provider can know what will happen. Maybe power prices increase. Maybe you stink as customer ( why ever ). Maybe the provider wakes up one day and want to become professional bungee jumper and drop the business.
The usual countermeasures for this kind of problem is:
2 years termination? No provider will do that. We are still talking here about 5-8 EUR or even 30-50 EUR contracts.... we are not talking about a billion dollar deal where people need to migrate 100k of servers with some millions of PB of data... there you will need 2 years -- not for 3 TB and not for 12 TB. So no provider will do that -> again too much exotic / individual solution for a too small amount of money
It actually boils down to the unhappy/lucky combination that you want:
Minimum payment + maximum individual solution => maximum f*** up for the provider with no minimum pay
That wont work.
So lets fall back to:
Search for a good, reliable and trustworthy provider who is some more time in business ( not the 3 years you wanted ) but lets say 10-15++ where you as a customer can assume that this business might be stable and serious enough for long term arrangements...
3-5 years is the timespan someone needs to study when he just left collage and is 20 years old ( if ever ) and do hosting as sideline / fun and sponsored by mom or dad. Thats really no timespan you can assume someone is doing a serious longterm business.
And forget the thing about saving money. There is no saving money here with your own hardware. Even if we assume you will find some hoster who will do this, you would have to pay him compensation for all this individual extra's leading to a price that, even if you stretch it on 10 years, wont be much different from just renting the space. -- But without the hassle of being responsible for hardware replacements.
Colocation makes sense if you have a specific size + long term arrangement. And 4 disks are really not enough size ^^; sorry no offense.
We are offering shared proxmox backup space for 4 EUR / redundant TB in germany or france that can be upgraded/downgraded any time. And thats i think the minimum amount you will have to consider for something longterm and stable. So go into the search with this kind of budget and you should find something suitable for you. There are enough hosters here. I assume most are not too much long in the market, but maybe they can compensate it with some cool feature / pricing so that you can just take 2 offers, encrypt your data and just hope for the best. If you already had issues in the past with providers, you will hopefully have some experience what to avoid and what might smell fishy to dodge that.
But unfortunately you will have to continue the path of trial and error to find the right hoster for you. This approach with your own disks might just end up in loosing your data + hardware when the hoster vanishes / cancels contract / what ever.
Good luck!
Hi,
they do something i was also thinking about: VPS with dedicated disks. Thats something that makes sense and can be a market ( quiet ultra small, but can be ).
This is really very different from what @DeadlyChemist wanted... using his own hardware. So zfs.rent are not using customer hardware ( if i understood it correctly ) they simply sell VPS with dedicated disks.
Thats like we would make a chassis full of NVMe drives and makes X drives dedicated to a customer. I thought about introducing this product in combination with a VDS. So basically dedicated and pinned CPU cores, RAM, disk. So that at the end you have basically your own physical server which is much more cost effective as long as you dont want too much cores/RAM/disk. But i thought there is no market for this, so i didnt introduce this product.
EDIT:
Haha, ok after clicking on pricing, they just write that with dedicated disks they actually mean the disks owned by the customer.... was not mentioned on the "product page" itself... sorry so you can forget this part of my post...
But yes... 10 EUR / disk is a direction where i can imagine that someone might build up a system around this organizational problem. So your product as hoster is actually this ( and not to lease out VPS's ... )
no clue, but thanks for letting me know
yeah i was thinking to say like 10y, but for some reason my brain was like "yeah 3 is enough"
my card can be charged/discharged by 3 people (lmao) there is always more than enough money on it, it's mostly about bank beeing a dick and not processing a payment, which no clue why it happens... or loosing a job, but yeah
so far it only happened once, but yeah
i never heard bad thing about layer7 i think, but yeah, out of my budget
might consider some other person but i'm back in square one...
thanks for the insight, at home, i could get my 4x4tb would cost about 20€/m with electricity, problem is my upload is 50 mbit and cannot be upgraded...
tl;dr; should any provider want to provide a solution for this, let me know... but i dont expect one, from thinking about what layer7 said, it's basically fucking over and ripping a provider off
i think for now i'll just stay with hbrr, for remote duplicati backups probably stay there
for proxmox might look for cheaper solution
but for endgame no clue, probably endless hopping and hoping
maybe dump most of the older PBS backups somewhere else... friend or my home, and keep only recent for restoring
uhh i'll think of something
genuine thank you @layer7 for your time and insight, really appreciated
and everyone else i'm still open for ideas
The latest version of pbs allows s3 as a backup datastore, might be something to consider
might test... thanks for letting me know
wonder how fast it can restore a idk, 100gb vm