The first plan isn't worth it, it's just for the eye.
I can think of some uses. I often don't want to install/compile something on my own system when I'm only testing it shortly, and I'd gladly pay $0.01 for a VPS for a few hours. I already did it today. The alternative would be a VM (and often VPN).
And honestly, it's freaking good for $1 per month.
Hence my post
The second plan though is very interesting. Double ram, double storage, and 4x Internet speed? Okay, that's soon to be sold out.
It's a cloud service, I don't expect one of them to sell out until they're all gone at once.
have you checked if they accept LN-BTC
They don't. They use plisio.net for crypto payments. It accepts BTC/LTC/XMR and more, I usually use a low-fee altcoin to avoid Bitcoin dust.
and if you pay once per month or annually?
It's prepaid, just pay what you need. I don't think credit expires, but there's no need to send a large amount.
I got tired of waiting, so I copied the pruned directory to my dedicated server. They both continued from 2016-08-31, and even before the VPS finished that day, the big server finished the entire next month. All in all I reached 19% for less than $0.07. It could still finish, but takes longer than I hoped for this little experiment.
Based on your experience, do you think plisio.net (payment service used by HostVDS) has poor privacy or discriminate towards user from third-world country?
I can't say, I used
Tor a VPN. They have no idea where I am.
Last time i tried cheap VPN (i don't remember name of the website) which mentioned on lowendtalk.com, their third-party system discriminate me based on my country.
I've seen many hosting providers that don't like Tor-registrations. I wouldn't call it discrimination, they're probably trying to avoid abuse. I even saw one that asks for a selfie with ID, so I just avoid those.
For VPN, I like Mullvad.net. Since it's also pay-per-hour, it nicely fits this topic. Pay them as little as you want and you'll get the minutes you paid for.
When trying to increase my balance at HostVDS, Plisio now shows:
error.Internal server error occurred, please, try again later
I'll chat with them
Update: their answer is useless:
Please, try again later. If this issue persists, please, provide us a screenshot with details
Update: It works without Tor (using a VPN). So I guess I didn't use Tor the first time I paid either.
although i actually wanted to say VPS.
In that case, I can recommend RackNerd from personal experience
Don't get the prices from their website, get the specials on Lowendtalk.
Black Friday deals are still available.
I've used them for 1.5 years, and only once got this email:
VPS Temporarily Rate Limited
Our systems have detected an unusual traffic pattern from your VPS, which may be malicious in nature. We have rate limited the VPS to avoid impact on the network from malicious activity.
I sent them an email (I was copying large files at that moment), and 12 minutes later they restored full speed.
Uptime so far: always
Note: I haven't dared sync a pruned Bitcoin Core node on that server.
I've now used the 2 GB VPS for 4 days. Bitcoin Core is at 2018-03-27 (35.5% complete).
The VPS got very slow, CPU steal is at 95%.
So this:
This is burst VPS, we guarantee 1/4 of CPU
It's true the CPU throttling indeed only started after a few days, but it dropped to 5%, instead of 25%.
That makes sense, the CPU has 4 cores, and giving 25% to a user who pays $2 per month won't pay the bills. But they should be honest about it.
At this rate, it's going to take a long time to complete. I'll experiment a bit more after I copy a finished "pruned node" to a new VPS.
I'll experiment a bit more after I copy a finished "pruned node" to a new VPS.
I got a new VPS (the cheapest one with just 1 GB RAM) and copied the pruned node data onto it. It continued syncing from 2023-01-18T18:04:37Z (just 9 days ago). It has 500 MB disk space remaining.
This gets you 3% more available disk space by reducing the reserved space from 5% to 2%:
It took about 2 hours to catch up on the last 9 days of transactions, which is 100 times faster than real-time. That also means just 1% of the CPU power is enough to keep it up to date, which means it shouldn't trigger the 95% CPU steal again.
To conclude my topic: a $1/month VPS with 1 GB RAM and 10 GB disk can indeed be used to run a pruned node, although it's better to do the initial block download on a more powerful system. Once synced, you can use a cheap VPS with 1 GB RAM for normal Bitcoin Core tasks through
bitcoin-cli.
I did another experiment, this time I took the most expensive VPS (160 GB NVMe, 4 CPU cores, 16 GB RAM, 200 Mbps bandwidth and Ubuntu 22.10). I installed Bitcoin Core, and let it sync (settings: 6 GB
dbcache and 80 GB
prune). This took less than 22 hours to complete and cost me just under $0.50 in total:
Currently:
Hello, Dear customer. We're out of stock at the moment, which may cause new servers not to create correctly. We are now working to increase our server base. Looking at the progress, it should be done in about a week.
At least this gives me the impression they're not overselling their servers, but it also looks like they don't have enough capacity to run at the low price they're offering.
Tiny update: they've added more different Linux distributions to choose from, and all (3) locations are available again. On Lowendtalk.com someone said they should rename to "SoonVDS" because of the many promises to add more locations "soon". Lol. It's still a very good price though, and they're still running
[moderator's note: consecutive posts merged]
