Best business model in the world, buy stuff in big bags, put it in smaller ones, sell at a multiple of the original price.

Fly is mostly (to my knowledge) reselling Netactuate and OVH servers, their main innovation is the developer experience on top, using Docker on a MicroVM based approach. Of course not only that, but I think it’s their main differentiator.

Haven’t used that in a while but Scaleway offered ridiculously cheap dedicated ARM hardware close to these price points, not sure if they still do.

Isn't that most business models? Make it easier to do something. A car is easier than a bike. A grocery store is easier than talking to a farmer. Ordering a cab is easier than walking. A VPS is easier than managing your own hardware.

There are plenty of better deals as long as you don’t limit yourself to big clouds and clouds with startup-esque landing pages frequently posted to HN. LowEndTalk may be the most well-known place for finding such deals.

(Not saying the typical cheap VPS on LowEndTalk has comparable PaaS features. Only responding to parent’s use case of a single cheap instance.)

Nowhere? Because that's a ridiculously low amount of RAM to offer even in your cheapest offerings?

You can easily get 4 GB of RAM for $5 from the likes of Hetzner or Hostinger, so that's 16x more RAM for 2.5x the price. One relatively unknown provider I have used in the past offers 2 GB of RAM for €3.6/month (if paid monthly, €3 if anually), so 8x more RAM for 1.5-2x the price. I'm sure I could find something even cheaper, but I'm just looking at providers I have personally used.

BTW that dropdown seems to be sorted cheapest > most expensive. If you go to the bottom of the list the price for that same VPS doubles.

> Nowhere? Because that's a ridiculously low amount of RAM to offer even in your cheapest offerings?

There's definitely places that offer it... also 512m

I know because I've personally bought such plans and that was $5-10/yr because I didn't need dedicated ipv4.

I'm getting 1$ for a 2gb ram vps in ovh for the first year

One such microVM per month used to be within the free monthly allowance, is that not the case anymore?

Sounds like a Lambda function....

Oracle free is one 4 core 24gb ram vps + 2 dualcore amd vps.

And actually, it's the resources that are free (CPU, memory, network) and you're allowed to split them up into multiple VMs if you want to.

One of my VMs had an uptime of more than 1050 days before the infrastructure rebooted it, so in terms of availability they've certainly surprised me.

The only downside I've come across with Oracle Free is that the 'best' regions are typically full. I ended up provisioning my free VMs in another region/country and it works fine.

I suppose another downside (if you want to view it this way) is they will delete idle unused free VMs after a certain time period. You have to add a credit card to your account to "upgrade" your account and run free resource indefinitely. While you're not charged for anything, it makes me nervous forking over a CC number to Oracle.

Maybe if you're limiting yourself to AWS-wrapper cloud companies. What good is a $2/mo cloud instance if it's down multiple times a month?

Just get a $5/mo VPS instead if you're really concerned about a few dollars a month.

> What good is a $2/mo cloud instance if it's down multiple times a month?

The perverse irony is that the most common reason cited by cloud providers for not letting people set a hard cap on charges is an insistence that surely the last thing you want in the world is for your service to be taken offline, even if it does means avoiding a $1k–$100k bill at the end of the month.

I used to use Racknerd for that sort of thing, and the costs were around there -- maybe $1.90/mo for a 512MB instance. It was easy to squeeze several hobby projects onto the machine.

i recommend lowendtalk what fly.io doing is running colocated baremetal servers and using firecracker to overcommit (probably via memory ballooning and other disk compression on demand)

if you are going to haggle over $2/month then you are better off just connecting your raspberry pi with wireguard/cloudflare tunnel on a residential connection