The LowEnd world has had a number of unicorns over the years.
Those are not billion-dollar startups but rather rare servers for ultra-cheap prices that are hard to get.
Ten years ago, a BuyVM $15/year VPS would have qualified. They released stock at 2am or something like that and if you wanted one, you needed to be clicking reload then and probably hanging out on IRC to time the exact drop.
The legendary Kimsufi KS-1 is another unicorn. For €5/month you can have a dedicated server all to yourself! A dedicated server for only €5/month! Now, if you are patient…if you are vigilant…then reloading on the Kimsufi site incessantly will someday pay off (or you can watch LowEndTalk – there’s sometimes a thread when stock pops up). Your reward will be a decade-old CPU that was anemic when it was new, paired with a drive with more mileage than your grandmother’s Oldsmobile. But it’s all yours!
My current unicorn is a Scaleway Learning instance. Described as “a tiny instance to test and host your personal projects on a cost-effective virtual machine and discover Scaleway’s ecosystem,” they bill at only €0.0001/hour – or about €0.07 a month! The Scaleway panel lists the “STARDUST1-S” system as:
- AMD Epyc 7281 CPUs
- 1 vCPU
- 1GB RAM
- 100 Mbps
I think you need to pay for few GBs/month of storage for your root volume, but still – this is pretty cheap.
They’re only available in Paris or Amsterdam – not exactly the most ideal geo for a West Coaster like me, but I can find something for the little guys to do (perhaps monitoring the state of all my idling nodes).
Alas, they’ve been unavailable every time I look back…and unlike other providers, I can’t set a changedetection.io monitor since you have to login, etc.
Anyone have one and care to comment? Worth the hunt?
If I ever do bag this unicorn, I’ll report it here. 🦄🎯
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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
Yeah.. You pay per ip 3 euro and 2 euro for 20gb storage.. And 11 cent for vps haha nice one total vps cost 5 euro month.
Even with IPv6-only it’d be 24 EUR/year and there are better, cheaper offers than that…thanks.
I put 10 gb, without ip it’s 1 euro p/m, it’s OK for small projects.
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