hetzner Alternatives?

October 28, 2021 5:55 AM

I was using Hetzner to experiment with K3s, Terraform and Ansible. It was cheap, barebones and great, I never really ran anything on it except 'whoami' servers to make sure it all worked, I was recently banned due to "sus;icious" activity with no resolution, I do not need HA or any managed K8s infrastructure and would like to keep costs down to a minimum. Hetzner seemed the best value and had some good servers but I cannot work with a provider that just shuts me down without warning and no resolution. Any alternatives especially with a strong github community or similar? Again the idea is to keep costs down and have this be a playground to teach me.
posted by geoff. to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

Digital Ocean maybe? But most of these providers have a pretty heavy hand with banning what they construe as abuse or suspicious activity because they do get abused so much and there are bad consequences for them if they don’t stamp it out quickly. This will be especially true for new accounts and free or very low-paying accounts.
posted by primethyme at 6:12 AM on October 28, 2021

Try Vultr; they start cheaper than DO and Linode. I couldn’t say if they’ll be friendlier to what you’re doing.
posted by michaelh at 6:50 AM on October 28, 2021

Response by poster: Really I'm just trying to setup K8s unmanaged with Terraform/Ansible as a learning experience
posted by geoff. at 8:52 AM on October 28, 2021

Civo is UK-based. I heard about it via friend who've volunteered to do some beta-testing. This is a blog post with a tutorial walk-through to let you confirm if it's the tool you want.
posted by k3ninho at 12:14 PM on October 28, 2021

An additional option to consider is UpCloud, with similar pricing to Vultr, Digital Ocean and Linode. Linode in particular had very responsive customer service when I used them, so if they did have a problem with your activity, you could reach out to find out why.

Or you could post on LowEndTalk to see if any providers there might give you a deal or even a free trial. At the very least, you could explain what you're doing so they won't be surprised by your non-standard usage.
posted by jaden at 7:19 PM on October 28, 2021

I use LunaNode for couple of VPS and they seem to be in the same price range as Hetzner.
posted by suetanvil at 9:56 PM on October 28, 2021

I've heard of cases where Digital Ocean seemed to randomly throw users off, so I'm happily using Linode.

I think I looked at OVH ages ago, but didn't use them, because of IP reputation or something. They had a massive fire a few months ago. Their servers were pretty cheap.
posted by Pronoiac at 3:04 AM on October 29, 2021