Ask HN: Reliable and cheap root server, 1GB+ RAM – which provider to choose?
For years I used Hetzer VQ12 (unmanaged virtual machine with root, Single Core, 1024 MB RAM, 40 GB HDD) for experiments and to run some Java processes.
Nothing special, nothing fancy, just a relatively cheap (12,90 € per month) and relatively reliable (one or two times per year notifications about scheduled downtime for about 15-30 min) hardware.
At the moment there is a cronjob on this machine. Every hour it triggers a Java process which runs for about 5-10 minutes.
Now Hetzner going to discontinue these servers (they notified me in advance) so I want to move either to another Hetzner product (probably their "cloud" CX11 or CX21) or to another hosting provider.
Please share your experience. I heard some positive feedback about digitalocean (droplets?)
UPDATE: I do not want to have dependencies on cloud infrastructure. Just plain old Linux command line, nothing more This sounds like something you could easily spin up on demand in AWS instead of aiming for reliability. Either an autoscaling group or a spot fleet that activates every hour, runs your job on startup, and kills itself. Micro is 1gb memory and costs $0.0104/h. Running that for 15min every hour is $1.8 a month. (+whatever storage space you need) You could probably use a heroku task as well. And Hetzner CX11 is €2.49 monthly and you have peace of mind regarding pricing (the price if FIXED). Probably I have to rephrase the question to something like
"Alternatives and side effects of Hetzner CX11 ?" The per-hour pricing I mentioned is fixed for the micro instance. (Well... It can go lower :-) ) I'm taking about normal EC2 instances here, so that is a cx11 alternative. Last year I used a VPS with specs similar to yours at LeaseWeb, for around €50/year. They're OK. I don't remember any downtime but I wasn't monitoring that VM 24/7.