VPS Hosting

Demand

To give an idea of the potential demand for a “free” VPS, here’s an anecdote. I found a thread on lowendtalk forum where cloudrino.net were advertising a free VPS for life. There was a waiting list. By the time I found the thread and signed up the waiting list had 140,000 emails.

Possible Products

Vanilla VPS

We have a reseller account with very flexible resource arranngement. We can offer VPS starting at $2.50. That’s cheap enough to be easy for the “free” option and attractive to get people in to the site. The offerings have a few OS choices like ubuntu and centos. We can configure RAM, CPUs, SSD and bandwidth pretty much however we like.

Specialized VPS

The “free” version could have things like minecraft servers and other gaming things as well as the usual VPS ranges. The people who do faucets etc are often the same people into gaming and are often too young or too poor to have bank accounts, now they don’t need one.

Cloudcone (see below in Sources) may have something that will do the job while still using cheap reseller accounts.

DIrect Admin VPS

A possible alternative to reseller hosting, without having to pay for a whole dedi. See satoshihost-vps1 page for more. For anyone who wants more than the hosting packages.

Self-Hosted

This seems difficult. We have to pay up-front for a whole server and then sell enough so we are not losing money. Then when we fill one we have to do the same again. Still there may be ways we can do it.

This page has some info on control panels if we do decide to give it a try.

Sources

  • AlphaVPS this 20 per year storage might be good.
  • Cloudserver has KVM 1GB 1 vcore for $10 per year. [ gone ]
  • Hostthebest.com also has 10 dollar VPS and more, [ gone ]
  • prohoster.info has some very cheap VPSs. E.g. CPU: 2 Core (LXD) 20GB  2Gb. for $2.60 and usually cheaper for first year. We have an account but no instances at the moment.
  • hostodo.com has some cheap VPSs (less than 2 dollars) – using them for the btcpay server.
  • We have an account with Ethernet Servers. (US only)
  • Ethernetservers offers are worth checking too.
  • Also with crowncloud. (US and EU)
  • rootnerds.com looks good, worth a try next. (July 2023) OpenVZ
  • With rootnerds as the cheap VPS, we could use vpsag.com as an easy way to have a range from 3 dollars upwards that fits well with the 2.50 cheap one. I can’t find anyone who does the really cheap ones and has good prices for the rest.
  • vpsag.com (KVM) has a good system. We could start by ordering just one.
  • quickhost.uk maybe… 2 pounds for cheapest. KVM – says VAT shown but will go at checkout
  • hostkey.com NO!!!!!! they do KYC – lowlife compliant scumbags
  • rootnerds.com has some batches of 10 we could use if we get a few customers, 2.50 would be viable here too.
  • vpsforvpn.com has some cheap deals incl 10 dollars per year and one on special for 15

Cloudcone has a similar flexibility and low cost, worth keeping as an option. They also have “snapshot templates” so we could configure and sell e,g, game servers.

Below Is Redundant

Old stuff archived.

We can provide VPS. I managed to get it working as a reseller, embedding the user’s control panel in a page in the site. This could be done a lot better when coded in professionally.

Virmach login embedded via frame.

Virmach started using cloudflare and now the panel will not show in an iframe. I have written to ask them if they can fix this or offer a better way. If Virmach turns out no good, Cloudcone looks ok, configurable and starts at 15 dollars (for now, at least).

What we are “competing” with are the free VPSes we see advertised from time to time. They attract large numbers of users and only a very few actually get one.