You may remember the old Community Roundups, which were a kind of weekly newsletter for LowEndBox. I have decided to try and reboot that, however this time incorporating a mixture of LEB and LET.
If you have anything interesting that you would like to share on this Community Roundup (which will be appearing every Sunday evening), then just leave a comment on this post and I will look through them all next week and pick out a few of the best items for the next edition. Also, I will be scouring LEB and LET for interesting news and stories.
LowEndBox New Offer Guidelines
As part of a plan to try and get new providers over on both the forums, and posting on LowEndBox, the decision has been taken in order to change the pricing guidelines. Full information on this is on https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/89726/lowendbox-new-offers-guidelines/p1 – but to summarise it:
| Type | Old price/rule | New price/rule (per month) |
| Unmanaged VPS | $7 | $10 |
| Shared hosting | N/A | $2.50 |
| Reseller hosting | N/A | $5 |
| VPN | N/A | $7 |
| Domains Common TLDs: Speciality TLDs: | N/A | $6 (per year)$10 (per year) |
| Managed VPS | N/A | $30 |
| Unmanaged dedicated servers | $49 | $50 |
| Managed dedicated servers | N/A | $150 |
As you can see, the most prominent change is the increase of the infamous $7 a month VPS cap to $10. This should prove very interesting, and I hope that this will produce some interesting offers. If you see anything that catches your eye, feel free to post it in the comments and it may be featured in next week’s Community Roundup.
DigitalOcean Introduces Charges for Snapshots
https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/89732/digital-ocean-to-begin-charging-for-snapshots
We start this week, with some news from one of LE’s biggest stalwarts, DigitalOcean. Although they may not be truly low end, they are still a provider that is used and respected by many in the LowEnd area. Their smallest VPSes fit perfectly within the $7 price range. I often see people who have started their projects at DigitalOcean, and are now looking to expand.
DigitalOcean started to allow users to create snapshots in the middle of 2012, and was a feature that had been heavily requested and DigitalOcean were very proud to release. Snapshots are where a user elects to take a full system state copy of their VM, which DO then store on separate hardware.
However, this week they announced that they were going to start charging for their snapshot service. This has been to the horror of many LowEndBox users who have been very passionately. Since the beginning, DigitalOcean had stated that they were going to charge but for the past 2 years they have not been doing so. This will all change on October 1st, when they will start charging for storage at $0.05 per gigabyte per month. This has come to a blow to many people, who were not expecting DigitalOcean to start charging, and had been using it like it was free forever.
For a user with a $5 a month VM, which had fully maxed out its disk space, this means that the user would be paying 0.05 (price 1 GB of storage, per month) x 20 (the cheapest plan has 20GB of SSD space) which equals 1 dollar a month. In my opinion, this is very respectable. A dollar a month for peace of mind that you have a secure copy of your VM that is stored externally.
In order to counteract this though, DigitalOcean stated that “live snapshots” were now something that can be done. This means that users can now take snapshots without having to turn their VM’s off. This alone, I feel, makes up for the dollar fee.
Finally, they encourage all users to check their snapshot usage (which can be done on the Snapshot page of their panel) and to delete any unused snapshots in order to avoid any unexpected charges.
The thread on LET had attracted quite a number of suggestions that Digital Ocean should allow users to download their own snapshots to avoid the storage fees. This is something that DigitalOcean are now looking into, and considering.
It is really nice to see such a large provider like DigitalOcean doing so much and listening/responding to the community.
New Providers:
- BudgetNode launched recently, and are getting very good reviews from the community. It is really nice to see providers who are bringing something new. They offer OpenVZ VPSes out of both Ashburn and Los Angeles. We have an interview with Ishaq from BudgetNode at the very end of this roundup! https://lowendbox.com/blog/budgetnode-ddos-protected-openvz-vps-starting-12year-ashburn-virginia
- TrunkSpace Hosting put their first post up on LET recently. They offer KVM and OpenVZ out of Ogden, Utah. They offer incredibly cheap VPS, with the proviso that the servers are not RAID’ed so there is always the risk of data loss. https://lowendbox.com/blog/trunkspace-hosting-kvm-openvz-servers-3-96-per-month-in-ogden-utah
Special Mention – HostFolks
The special mention section of our Community Roundups are going to be a place to show off offers that are extra special, or providers that go the extra mile for the community.
HostFolks posted an offer on LowEndBox (https://lowendbox.com/blog/hostfolks-kvm-and-openvz-servers-starting-2-95mo-in-multiple-locations/) this week, after a 4-year absence. They have some very nice offers and a wide variety of locations around the USA and the EU. They put out some incredibly generous offers for LEB readers.
Thank you to @hawc for contributing this article to the community.
- MikroVPS Kft – Hungarian Xen VPS with 10Gbit/s Uplinks - November 10, 2016
- Swissnode – Switzerland VPS Offer - November 3, 2016
- IO Zoom – DDoS Protected VPS in Los Angeles, Chicago and Miami - November 2, 2016
Leave a Reply