Of all of our 5,000+ pages and posts, one stands out as consistently the most popular page.  This page gets a ton of views every day, and if you google “lowendbox” it’s usually the second listing, right under the home page listing.

The page?  Our listing of $1 cheap VPS systems!

Yes, you can get a fabulous VPS system for $12 a year or yes.  Considering that you’ll pay 4-6 times that to get in the door at major providers, this is a pretty amazing deal.

Of course, technically it’s not $1 a month but $12 a year (or less) in most cases.  That’s because there is a transactional cost to billing someone for a dollar twelve times a year which would swamp any profits.

But getting a full years’ service for $12 is still a great deal!

These are usually systems in the 512MB-1GB range.  What could you do with such a system?  A lot.  Don’t look at that 512MB the way you’d look at your laptop.  512MB to 1GB is more than enough to run a VPN, monitoring poller, or small web site.  Really?  Oh yes, really.

We’ve got featured offers on that page from

• RackNerd: 768MB for only $10.28/YEAR!
• CloudServer: 1GB for only $10/YEAR!

Now if you want to step up to a little bit more – say, about $1.50 a month – then the field opens quite a bit.  Including:

• ServerHost: 1.5GB system with unmetered bandwidth for $1.40/month
• Ethernet Servers: 1GB system with 2TB bandwidth for only $14.95/year!

raindog308

Raindog308 is a longtime LowEndTalk community administrator, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

As an avid user of LowEndBox providers, Raindog runs an empire of LEBs, from tiny boxes for VPNs, to mid-sized instances for application hosting, and heavyweight servers for data storage and complex databases. He brings both technical rigor and real-world experience to every piece he writes.

Beyond the command line, Raindog is a lover of German Shepherds, high-quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop RPGs, and hiking in deep, quiet forests.

His goal with every article is to help users, from beginners to seasoned sysadmins, get more value, performance, and enjoyment out of their infrastructure.

You can find him daily in the forums at LowEndTalk under the handle @raindog308.