Bitcoin Forum

I process quite a lot of useful data on Bitcointalk (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5145594.0), which is hosted on loyce.club (http://loyce.club/). I create the data on my PC, and recently have been moving some of the data creation to a cheap VPS (https://lowendbox.com/blog/x4servers-ssd-vps-plans-out-of-chicago-as-low-as-2-a-month/). This (my first VPS) was an experiment to see if it suits my needs.
Setup was easy, and the performance is often very good. But: not all the time, and there's the problem. The server is probably oversold too much, because several hours per day it's so slow it takes minutes to respond to a simple "uptime" command, and the load average goes up while doing virtually nothing. During those hours, it's too slow to keep downloading my unedited posts (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5167469.0). Despite the "99.9% uptime guarantee", the VPS is sometimes totally unresponsive, or just offline.

Needless to say, I need something else! But as a VPS n00b, all I see is that almost any provider has good and bad reviews on Lowendbox.com and Lowendtalk.com. My current host is paid per month, but I don't just want to try several of them if I have to pay for a year.

OpenVZ vs KVM?
From what I understand, OpenVZ is cheaper than KVM, and easier to configure as I don't need to install the OS myself. I'm not sure though.

I don't need much RAM, I can work with only a few GB SSD space because I upload my data to my 100 GB shared hosting (although more is obviously more convenient), one CPU is enough, and I don't mind if it's a bit slower once in a while. But it should never be totally unresponsive.
My current VPS is great when it works, but I'd gladly have half the performance if that means it's available all the time.
I need about 24h of CPU-time per week

So: I'm looking for a VPS that offers great value for money, and doesn't give me down time. I'd love to see an "uptime" for as long as I've had the VPS (a few years in the future), without ever having to reboot. My current VPS now has just 8 hours uptime, it was off when it should have updated my Trust Flag viewer (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5153695.0) and banned users list (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5092983.0), and it didn't download "recent posts" for 7 hours. That makes it useless to me :(
Obviously, I want to be able to pay in Bitcoin.
If someone is interested in sponsoring loyce.club with a VPS, we can probably work something out too :)

A long time ago I used: https://www.steadyturtle.com
They also have an announcement thread somewhere on Bitcointalk, and u can pay in btc.

Recently I also bought a VPS from STRATO, which is still online and running perfectly, no downtime at all. However u can bot pay with btc there.

Hope this helps!

You could DIY on GCP
here's a free $300 credit (https://console.cloud.google.com/freetrial/signup/tos?_ga=2.96704860.-259360110.1563502566&_gac=1.148966084.1565452532.CjwKCAjw1rnqBRAAEiwAr29II4IaTGwhyIUF1-M3EdLe3BXOcg2PGSak4u9cL3ZV_TlZeM7rC1wGhRoCFcwQAvD_BwE),
if you like it ill sell you a 100,000.00 credit for a nice discount. spark.
You can do lots of things with a 100k credit with your technical expertise.
Loyce I also sell high end enterprise grade stuff irl.
I have things in hand people never get to see unless its rented instances.
I could in theory just sell you a nice server that meets your spec requirements at a nice discount and you slap it in your office or something
Crowdfund it. Ill self escrow with you as you've been nothing but helpful to me and I get nothing but positive vibes from you.

Been there some time ago. I was looking for some cheap offsite VPS and tested a few I found on lowendbox.com and the lesson learnt was simple: the cheaper - the slower and more time unresponsive and more unreliable.

$2/month is just ridiculous, this has to be oversold massively to even become remotely profitable after power, cooling and housing cost (not even speaking about hardware amortization). In my experience the cost for a responsive, not too oversold VPS starts at >$100 per year.

Do I understand this correctly from your description: You want to use that VPS just for downloading data from here, then crunching it somehow and then re-uploading it to your own hosting server?

Seconding the Google Cloud free trial. You get $300 USD to spend for a year, but you do need to verify with a credit card. I've used GCP for all of the game servers I've ran for friends which probably takes much more power than scraping, and you can't get much better reliability than Google.

There's also a permanent free tier that might work for your uses, but the spec is pretty low. You get a shared vCPU, 614 MB of RAM and a 10 GB disk.

For how much month?, and how much Hardisk you need?
when only 1-2 month and under 50GB hardisk, 1GB ram, i give you free for that.

Thanks for the suggestions, I took my time to give it some thought.

I'm looking for more recent experiences :)

Accepting Bitcoin is really a requirement, partially out of principle, but also because I don't want to tie my creditcard to anything Bitcoin-related.

I've seen this before, but they only give a free trial after I give them my creditcard. And that's the last part of information Google doesn't have on me yet.

You mean I have to physically plug it in myself? I kinda did that just now, but with an old netbook. Long-term, I don't want to run it from my own internet connection (the page load limitations alone are a reason to get rid of it).

That makes sense :) However, paying more doesn't guarantee it's not still oversold, so I can't rely on just that.

Correct. I need continuous uptime to download files several times per minute.

I could probably work with that (although CPU might be a problem for Merit and Trust updates), but the CC is really where I draw the line.

I'll need a server for at least the coming years.

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I got https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud-compute/ suggested in a PM. Just posting it here to have everything in one place.

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I've just booted up an old Atom netbook to use as a dedicated server for the coming weeks. My priority now is to get all my data processing working without manual intervention. It was a mess already, and got worse when I moved half my data to the VPS.
So for now, I've postponed the search for a VPS. Once the netbook has all cronjobs working, I can migrate in less than an hour.

You can look at Low End Box (https://lowendbox.com/tag/bitcoin/), a website that compiles offers from many various VPS providers. You can apply various filters/tags such as those that accept bitcoin.

You probably won’t find any free providers that will allow you to sign up without a credit card due to possible abuse.

SporeStack might be of use to you

I can personally vouch for Virmach (https://virmach.com) and time4vps (https://www.time4vps.com/), have been using them since a year and haven't encountered any downtime yet. Plus customer service of both of them is excellent, you would get reply within couple hrs.

They both accept cryptocurrencies.

Use leb30 on virmach for 30% recurring discount.

Use THR on time4vps for one time discount (sorry, I forgot how much discount was it lol)

Try them, I am sure your experience will be pleasant with them ;)

Since my hosting for loyce.club suddenly decided to just stop offering service (despite being paid up front until 2021), I'm now urgenly looking for a replacement!

I have to go now, but needed to quickly post this. I'll create a scam accusation against KayHosting.com later.

Their website is still advertising hosting....   how did you pay them?

I sent you a PM.

You're not the only one affected it seems:
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/12/08/1549222/20-low-end-vps-providers-suddenly-shutting-down-in-a-deadpooling-scam


If you go the order page you will get the "out of stock" message, just like the other 20+ services that went down.

Loycev, there are a lot of people who use your service and I'm sure at least a few of them would donate to be sure loyce.club has 100% uptime on a reliable service so you should probably look for something other than a 2-5$ cheap service. Just like proton, quality is more important sometimes.

This said, is bc1qwd9pg4a6yejnpaakp58vwc759kgyf5x2qunuu8 still controlled by you?
I'll take the first two months bills once you find something.



 

In my experience, of the cloud services from industry heads (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle), Google is perhaps the most reliable. But not the most affordable for sure. Also, to get familiar with any cloud platform, there's a very brand specific learning curve. I think the plain-old linux VPS hosting is the best. Pre-optimized VPNs are always more affordable too in comparison to setting up a machine in a cloud service too.

Bitcoin, of course :P
They're rediculously cheap for what they offered, but that's still not a reason to suddenly stop providing services.

Thanks! Deathwing offered me a VPS, which should get most of my data back online. However, it's a busy day for me before the holidays, so I hope to get it done tonight.
I already know I have more data than will fit this VPS, but getting most of it online again soon is my first priority.

I also read Cpanel changed it's billing system, which lead to large increases per domain name on a shared server. This killed a large part of the shared hosting market.

I haven't even emptied all previous donations yet, but still, I prefer to keep recurring costs as low as possible and I for sure don't want to ask for payment or advertising on loyce.club. It was only meant to be an extention of data that doesn't fit in a 64 KB post, but it got a bit out of hand :P

That's the one in my profile, so yes :) The reason I never post an addy on any other webserver is that I trust my Bitcointalk profile much more than any webhost.

Lucky you, it looks like the first 2 months are free thanks to Deathwing :)

The big cloud companies all require a creditcard, which I'm not willing to give them. All I need is a simple terminal login to a Linux machine with some resources behind it :)

I got to go now. I've updated DNS records, and will continue later.

I'm locking this thread: thanks to a generous AWS donation, loyce.club is hosted for a long time :)