I talked to two different friends this week who approached me about a VPS. They knew I “do stuff in that area” (i.e., write for LowEndBox) and wanted a recommendation.
It’s one thing when I’m ponying up my own $5 a month and I’ve had tons of systems and if this one breaks, I can easily move on. But when you’re putting your reputation on the line…
Both recommendations I made got the standard “what do you want” discussion. If you want a big company with high uptime, support, etc. then I’d just go with Vultr or Amazon LightSail or, if you must, DigitalOcean. If you’re paying $5-10 a month and you’re fine with that, there’s no point trying to shave off a few bucks and worry about dealing with a LowEnd provider. Not to say that there aren’t excellent LowEnd providers, but I’d probably default to a bigger mainstream firm if (a) this is your only VPS, (b) you have some technical experience but are not really a Linux sysadmin, and (c) you want something fire and forget.
But if you want very specific geography and know what you’re getting into, a LowEnd provider can be excellent. You’ll save money and you might get even better support, but it’s hit-or-miss and you need to shop harder.
It’s like the old saying in IT: “No one ever got fired for buying IBM”. That’s outdated today – perhaps in 2024, we’d say “no one ever got fired for buying Amazon AWS”. The idea is that if you’re buying the leader, you don’t have to defend your decision. But if you’re buying something else, if it breaks, someone is going to say “why didn’t we go with IBM / AWS”.
In my case, I recommended one LowEnd and one mainstream.
The Friend Who Needed a VPN / Game Server
Friend #1 is an immigrant from a foreign country and wants a VPN for viewing purposes…and then like everyone, his requirements changed as he was talking. He as thinking of signing up with NordVPN.
I’ve never used Nord so I don’t know if they’re any good. There are advantages to going with a provider like that: you get ton of POPs, your traffic is mixed in with everyone else’s, and there are tons of locations to choose from.
However, he also wanted a VPS as a game server for Minecraft with his kids. That changes things. For a VPN only, you can get away with a very small system – heck, I ran them on 32MB (!) systems back in the day, though 128MB is more common and today I’d just buy a 1GB system. But for a game server, you want something much bigger and beefier. I told him to shop for a VPS for a game server first, because it’s trivial to add a VPN to it.
He went with CrunchBits based on geography.
The Dev Friend
Friend #2 is a developer who has been working on Virtualbox and such but now wants to put a service out on the web so others can try it.
He doesn’t need a ton of horsepower, but enough so that he’s not trying to figure out why gunicorn is dying due to OOM. We talked and I think a 2GB VPS would be more than adequate for him, since he’s going to have low concurrent users at this “gamma code” (alpha->beta->gamma) stage.
However, he might want to hook in to other services down the road, like Firestore, storage volumes, and load balancers. Firestore doesn’t matter – that’s essentially a SaaS database solution from Google. But block volumes and load balancers drives you to a higher tier of provider.
He ended up going with Amazon LightSail, mainly because he uses AWS at work and thinks he might use some of their API
Who Do You Recommend?
When friends, family, or your boss comes to you and says “I’m shopping for a VPS,” who do you recommend? Let us know in the comments below!
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I also enjoy using LEBs! I have an empire of little guys for VPNs, larger guys for apps, and big guys for databases and storage. When I'm not in front a screen I'm into German Shepherd dogs, quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop roleplaying games, and forest hiking.
I enjoy writing technical articles here on LowEndBox to help people get more out of their systems. You can find me on LowEndTalk @raindog308
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