But then I realized you are limited in bandwithd to 20 TB, while OVH provides, for barely more €, unmetered traffic. It's huge because you never have to worry about a random spike day, a bot doing something stupid, an attack, or a use case switch (ex: video streaming).
There have been times where I wasn't able to get more than a handful Mbps from an OVH box in RBX to any network I've tried (multiple eyeball networks, Google Cloud, AS204880...). I also know multiple people who had to quickly migrate out of OVH because they suddenly got DSL-tier performance to their critical customers, and there was nothing they could do about it.
So it might be theoretically unmetered, but technically... I'd be surprised if you'd be reliably able to push more than 20TB in a month to outside OVH's AS, or even datacenter. You get what you pay for, and while network connectivity is not nearly as expensive as what large cloud providers would like you to believe, it's not free.
A true unmetered, non-oversubscribed, globally reaching Gbps link would run you something close to $200/mo in T1 transit commitment costs alone, and that's if you buy in bulk and already have good settlement-free peering with large networks to supplement that T1 transit.
How are you using 20TB/month? Are you running a tor relay or something?
There is more to the web than crud.
not really. 90% of people using the cheapest vps are going to host wordpress or crud apps on there, not their video streaming startup that competes with youtube.
With what Hetzner prices at I'm always on the look out for a US competitor but there doesn't seem to be one yet -- best prices consistently come from OVH most of the time or LeaseWeb.
(as a side note, is there an NA-equivalent of Hetzner?)
You can always skip the Kubernetes overhead and use plain VMs.
Obviously you can't expect too much from a single vCPU at that price, but as an example, I had the above setup plus miniflux (feed reader), Postgres, Maddy (mail server) and Nginx for a few static sites, all on the cheapest instance. It was mostly fine, apart from occasioal stutters.
Of course, if you're already doing a devops or particularly mean full stack regular job where this is your daily bread, you might as well use the knowledge.
They have K8s cloud controller manager to manage load balancers and private networking, and driver for attaching persistent volumes. Also, instances go up to 32 vCPU/128 GB of memory, so they are more than enough to run most loads, including the control plane.
For that I'd rather look into scaleway (starting at 15 EUR/month for DEV1-M), who offer services like managed kubernetes or S3 compatible object storage. What I like about their pricing is that it's very predictable. For example traffic is free (but bandwidth is limited) and object storage is only billed by size, not by API calls.
(disclaimer: I didn't use scaleway yet, so I don't know if it works reliably in practice)
DigitalOcean unlike other providers does not allow you to easily download your disk images or backups of your own servers.
It has been a feature requested many times and support simply lets you (eventually) know that it’s not going to happen.
That means you cannot have backups stored in more than one location, and more regularly, it’s a veiled form of lock in to make it unable for you to move.
Other vendors simply let you download your disk image, snapshot or backup at anytime.
DO has a good interface, but so do others. Proxmox or ESXi can be run pretty easily on a piece of equipment too.
OVH and Hetzner are strong options, and I have heard good experiences with Linode, who’s pricing is on part with DO.
1. mount /mnt/archive <block_storage>
2. dd if=/dev/<your_sda_partition> of=/mnt/archive/<my_image> bs=64K conv=noerror,sync
3. Download your image from your block.
?
It’s an active and intentional hurdle, it could just link to the file of the snapshot and allow you to DL.
DO has a few features that Hetzner lacks: S3 equivalent, managed Kubernetes and managed databases. So you need to have enough tolerance for managing all of that yourself. (they do have storage volumes, so you can get there with self hosted Minio etc, but it's obviously more work)
Support is pretty good, but quite a bit more responsive if you have larger deployments.
It seems to be seriously rate limited to the point of being unusable.
https://blog.royalsloth.eu/posts/how-much-traffic-comes-from...
It's definitely viable for businesses if you need to save money.
Although I primarily recommend it for secondary workloads.
As a business you will probably be better off having S3/GCS and managed Kubernetes, managed databases etc. Better guarantees and less risk. And everyone is familiar with the big clouds, so less training for new hires.
But I'd personally be way too stressed and annoyed by worrying about the often very restrictive free tier limits. You can very easily blow through the network egress, for example.
For things I want to be cheap I've started hosting a lot of things on Hetzner Cloud [1].
Even their cheapest instance (1vCPU/2GB RAM/20TB traffic) at 2.5 Euro/month can run a k3s Kubernetes cluster with Traefik ingress, loki logging, their own CSI driver, cert-manager, Grafana and a 2 or 3 light weight Go/Rust services. With their Terraform provider I can easily scale up the cluster in less than a minute.
And since it's Kubernetes I can also always move things to GC or AWS if required.
That's incredibly cheap, and you don't have to worry about limits or free tier periods ending, etc. It's a long-term solution.
I'm sure there are some other similar providers out there.
edit: to be clear, I also have clients with sizable production workloads on the same infrastructure, it's not just for tiny toy deployments. Above is just an example how far you can go for almost no money.
[1] https://www.hetzner.com/cloud