investigate alternative VPS providers

[bhpayne]

If all you want are virtual servers (==droplets), DO is one of the more expensive options around. Of course substantially cheaper than AWS/Azure/GCP, but much more expensive than Hetzner/OVH/Netcup or anything on lowendboxes.com).

[bhpayne]

For the past 4 years (2020-2024) I was able to run (Docker, Flask, Gunicorn, nginx) on DigitalOcean with a 1 vCPU, 1GB RAM, 25 GB storage for $4/month and more recently $6/month.

Now that I added Neo4j as a 3rd container the 1GB of RAM is inadequate -- web requests timeout in the browser and no content is rendered.

Upgrading the DigitalOcean droplet to 1 vCPU, 2GB RAM, 25 GB storage costs $12/month

Memory utilization as of 2024-09-03 using docker stats:

NAME                             CPU %     MEM USAGE / LIMIT     MEM %
allofphysicscom-nginx-1          0.00%     4.082MiB / 1.922GiB   0.21%
allofphysicscom-flask-1          4.95%     319.4MiB / 1.922GiB   16.23%
allofphysicscom-neo4j_docker-1   1.07%     479.7MiB / 1.922GiB   24.37%

[bhpayne]

https://www.netcup.com/en

German company. Has US hosting capability.

as of 2024-09-02, lowest cost relevant configuration: "VPS 250 G11s"

• 3.35 eur is currently $3.71 usd
• 2 vCore (x86)
• 2 GB ECC RAM
• 64 GB SSD
• Traffic included

Unfortunately, the US-based servers are only available for beefy configurations. The "VPS 250 G11s" is hosted in Germany; see https://www.netcup.com/en/server/vps

[bhpayne]

https://www.namecheap.com/hosting/shared/

Is not a VPS. Provides disk space and pre-configured web services. Not suitable for running Docker.

[bhpayne]

https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/

Servers hosted in Germany or Finland

CX22 is

• 2 vCPU
• 4GB RAM
• 40 GB SSD for 4.51 eur ($5 USD) per month

[bhpayne]

AWS VPS is "LightSail"

https://calculator.aws/#/createCalculator/Lightsail

The configuration "Bundle:2GB" features

• Storage: 60GB
• vCPU: 2
• Memory: 2GB
• Data Transfer Quota: 3TB and costs $11.77/month

[bhpayne]

Google Cloud (GCP)

https://cloud.google.com/compute/vm-instance-pricing#general-purpose_machine_type_family

"e2-standard-2"

• 2 vCPUs
• 8GB RAM for $55.08726/month in Virgina, or $48/month in Iowa. Cheaper if you sign up for 1 or 3 years.

[bhpayne]

AWS S3 is suitable for static sites only. Dynamic content would need to live in lambdas for on-demand execution.

As per https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/mfbgot/is_aws_a_good_alternative_to_a_20mo_vps_for/

[bhpayne]

https://ioflood.com/bare-metal-cloud-server.php

• Dual Intel Xeon E5-2695v4 CPUs
• 36 CPU cores
• 64GB RAM
• 960GB NVMe SSD
• 100TB @ 10Gbps (Inbound unmetered) for $99/mo monthly