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Slow Servers

Hand drawn+painted logo, by my wonderful wife, without the assistance of AI.

A Simple Site, offering (relatively) Slow Servers hosted on Secondhand Systems in Spokane, Washington, with (hopefully) Satisfactory Service.

If Ted Kaczynski had wanted a VPS host, Slow Servers might've been a contender.

Why on earth would I want a "slow server?" It's slow!

You might not! But slow is relative. Compared to the latest Ryzen processors, it's slow. But if you want to host a basic website, have a Jabber server, DNS, etc, it's probably fast enough for most. Our hardware is absolutely bleeding edge compared to something from the year 2,000. It could probably get you to the moon and back if you believe in that sort of thing (I do, but my wife doesn't.)

It's just hard to justify buying new hardware when there's so much adequate hardware already made. It's not like circuit boards biodegrade -- there's a significant environmental cost for performance benefits hard to justify for most. One could argue that the Internet is unnecessary, and it probably is. But some of us remember it being used primarily for human communication and the sharing of knowledge, and for the Internet's most useful functions, these "Slow Servers" are quite adequate.

These servers are also slower because they are chosen and designed to use less power. This is cheaper for me, (possibly) cheaper for you, and better for the environment. Slow Servers is the manifestation of an idealistic vision of what hosting should be. There's no ambition to pursue the latest and greatest, keeping up with the Jones', and their great-great grandchildren. The idea is to maintain year 2010 levels of communication without WALL-E (TM) levels of trash and waste upgrading equipment every few years.

What Slow Servers offers

Virtualized Private Servers (VPS) hosted on OpenBSD with VMM. The VPSs have only IPv6 connectivity by default, but IPv4 is available for a fee. Alternatively, inbound IPv4 is available free of charge through our own SNIProxy server, so the legacy IPv4 Internet can still reach many services on your server(s). There are more ammenities, described below.

Pricing

All plans have only one vCPU, which is shared. Routed /64 IPv6 allocations are included.

You likely won't notice much performance gain in the larger sizes, unless your needs are memory bound. Their main use is if you need more disk space. Unfortunately, VMM is unable to allocate more than one vCPU.

Though the prices are quoted monthly, billing is done annually at this time.

Transfer is a rough guideline. If you go over a little bit on some months, it's no big deal.

If you would like a IPv4 address (most people do!) it's $1.00/month extra.

If you would like extra transfer per month, it's $1.00/month per 512GB.

Amenities

IPv6-only specific amenities

In case you want to save $1/month and still have some IPv4 connectivity.

Operating Systems

I use and recommend OpenBSD.

Location

Spokane, Washington, USA

Payment

Slow Servers accepts Monero, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, and USDT. Cash or silver in mail to the PO box below is also possible. Payments are annual, at this time.

Ordering

You can currently order Slow Servers a few different ways. But please first read the Service Level Agreement and Acceptable Usage Policy, whichever way you choose!

Order through SSH

This is probably the fastest option for most, if paying with cryptocurrency. Works over IPv6 or IPv4.

ssh signup@slowservers.net

No password needed and no SSH key.

Or, via Tor.

You'll probably need something like this in your ~/.ssh/config:

Host *.onion
	ProxyCommand nc -x localhost:9050 %h %p

Now you can run:

ssh signup@slowsvr7rgnkzuoma5byw34n2mkkg6v7g5q6qxqaihh7zikp5wn26fid.onion

Just follow the prompts! It'll give you payment information for your order. Provisioning is still manual, and may take up to 48 hours.

Order by email

For example:

Hi Slow Servers,

I would like to purchase one "$5.00/month: 1GB of memory, 32GB of disk with IPv4" server from you for one year.

My SSH Public key is: ssh-ed25519 AAAAC4NzaC1l...

I would like OpenBSD 7.9.

You may pick the hostname and my username to access my VPS' host with.

I will pay for one year with Monero.

Thank you,

Pseudononymous Philosopher

I will respond with an invoice. After payment, I will send you another email with details.

If you wish to use PGP or signify +/- age, see the "security fingerprints" link below.

Ordering via mail

If you really want to maximize the "slow" experience, we can correspond via mail.

PO Box 163,
Saint Maries, Idaho
83861 USA

(I recommend not specifying a name here like Slow Servers, just PO Box 163.)

Note that the PO box is likely to only get checked about once a month unless it gets used often. This address will likely change in the future!

Cash in mail or silver payments are possible. Realistically, it's probably best to send an email before doing this, but maybe you're feeling brave?

And please don't send silver from abroad, then ask for a refund of that silver, back to your international address!

Managed Hosting Services

Would you rather have static web hosting than a VPS? Or perhaps something more complicated?

Site Navigation

Policy-related

Other

Slow Servers Status

Slow Servers Endpoints

Slow Servers is Gemini native and/or available over Tor. The site itself is hosted on one of our VPSs and comes to you from Spokane, Washington.

Planning to add I2P in the future.

Looking glass, test IPs, etc

If you want test IPs, just use the AAAA/A records on slowservers.net. This is hosted on Slow Servers, so should give you a good idea of the network path and if Slow Servers might be a good fit for you, network wise.

A Final Note