For static site hosting there are a ton of "good enough" free options these days like GitHub Pages, Netlify, etc.

For pure VPS, there are cheaper options, especially if you don't need a ton of customer support like DO offers.

For example, buyvm.net has a VPS with 1 vCPU, 1GB RAM, 20GB SSD, and unmetered bandwidth for $3.50/mo. DO's cheapest VPS is 1 vCPU, 1GB RAM, 25GB SSD, and 1TB bandwidth for $5.00/mo.

Digital Ocean does offer a ton of value in other ways - support, uptime SLA, and other managed products...

Edit: Check out https://lowendbox.com/ to find cheap VPS providers.

Very happy BuyVM customer. The unmetered bandwidth really is unmetered, and support from the founder has been remarkably transparent and often minutes when he's awake and working.

Have you checked the performance of their VPS:es? Any numbers to share? I've been thinking of using them because of their anycast support.

CPU:

    model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1270 v3 @ 3.50GHz

So yes, it's a 7 year old quad core, with maximum of 32 GB of RAM. You only get access to one core (technically thread); 512NB to 2GB nodes can burst to use the full thread, but are expected to not 100% it. The 4GB node (1/8th of the server) is allowed to fully peg their thread.

Some of the newer servers are powered by AMD Ryzens, which is a great thing (they are far better perf/$ now; they're on GCP, and Tencent is deploying tens of thousands of ryzens in their DC).

I have a 2GB node, and I've ran Geekbench 5 and got a score of 661. Here are the results: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/1278946

For comparison, a Vultr 1GB ($5/m) has a geekbench score of 2413.

For most web server needs, BuyVM should suffice.

Yes, other providers are much faster; but other providers don't offer unmetered bandwidth. BuyVM is great for bandwidth heavy, compute-low loads.

Check scaleway and hetzner

https://www.hetzner.com/cloud https://www.scaleway.com/en/pricing/

Pretty sure Linode is comparable price wise and in Europe there are cheaper options like OVH. Digital Ocean pricing becomes pretty comparable with GCP and others when you start specing up to a "production-grade" server i.e. the kind of server you actually want to run Postgres on.

Their K8s offering I think is the cheapest of all major providers but you lose out of secondary benefits like GKE's fantastic log analysis tools (I think its called stackdriver or something).

Their database offerings are in about the same range as other providers (not comparing it to Google Cloud $panner).

Just popping in to say that OVH is the cheapest option for a reason -- support/monitoring/any other features you might want are just not there like they might be on other providers.

I host a single tiny website on OVH and they restart it randomly every ~4 months without warning (seriously). It was annoying at first until I set our services to run on system boot.

Some more discussion at discourse.org that's relevant: https://meta.discourse.org/t/migrate-from-digital-ocean-to-o...

I suppose it depends on what OVH offering you buy. I have multiple servers at OVH with multiple years of uptime, but those are dedicated ones and not the cheapest Kimsufi offerings.

I have multiple projects on the cheapest Hetzner.cloud offering and haven't run into any of these issues. might be worth looking into.

> until I set our services to run on system boot.

Which pretty much is how things were always done, even in the PHP-CGI days.

>Are there cheaper options?

Definitely. There is an entire ecosystem of small VPS providers below DO & co.

e.g. I'm currently paying 7 USD for a 4 core w/ 16gig ram. Modern hardware too - Ryzen & NVme.

Trade-off is you need to spend time hunting for once off deals & there is no guarantee the provider will still be around tomorrow & you never know whether it's oversold.

For 500-1000 pageviews per month (maybe even per day?) I think you could get away with the free tiers of (if static: github pages, netlify), or (if dockerable: Google cloud run), or (if postgres required heroku) or now.sh or lamba. vultr offers a $2.50 VPS.

AWS Lightsail has a $3.50/month option that might work for you if you want a VM. You could even consider something like nearlyfreespeech.net if you dont need full control of the tech stack.

Lightsail viciously throttles to something like 5% of original CPU after only a bit of use. Not suitable for much.

You can get OpenVZ or even KVM boxes for half the price or better. I have one running as a simple nginx webserver and OpenVPN server that I pay under $30 a year for