This is awesome! Small projects like this that take off are fun to read.
Maybe I'm imaging it but FreeBSD really seems to have far less bloat than Linux distros and better latency. I just setup a $4/mo FreeBSD VM on Vultr with 1G RAM and 1vCPU and it's only using 12% of RAM with Caddy. A VM with 4GB of RAM and 4 vCPUs could serve a lot of traffic.
I'm wanting to create a personal blogging with a retro BBS-like web app with a text first interface with a multi-threaded Nim server + sqlite. I'm sure something exists already but it'd more for my own tinkering. No containers, no async, no javascript libraries. Just a small 4MB binary and FreeBSD. This posts encourages me on the FreeBSD route!
Unbloated distros exist, Alpine is one example. I was taken aback how snappy it is. Does everything without any undue delay. Merely logging in via SSH feels quicker as you don't have to wait a second for the prompt like on Ubuntu. apk is also super fast.
Man I love alpine even though I don't use it so much but alpine does hold a special place in my heart for some reason (and i think the reasons are good)
Tinycore is another one which holds a special place in my heart, partially because its the most no BS simple alpine-like os that I have seen which is rather focused on the consumer side, so you can get GUI systems super quickly and minimalist.
The minimalist tinycore iso with gui and terminals ran on 21-40 MB :) let that sink in
They showed as 0.0% or 0.1% on my 8 gig computer.
I used tinycore to take my really old laptop which my brother used to game on mostly and was super dead, it was a dell mini pc with intel atom 1 gig of ram 32 bit, probably 10-15 years old
I ran tinycore on it with no problem and ended up with wifi access and then even ran modern firefox browser and ended up even running a website like https://pomodorokitty.com/ on it
Man,do i love them both.
I genuinely just wanted to create a service which could just boot tinycore gui servers in the browser perhaps via novnc for people to play with but I seriously wondered who might pay for the project
Oh btw oops forget that you can already do that by just downloading the iso of tinycore and then going to copy.sh/v86
In fact that inspired me to create the project but one of the issues of copy.sh/v86 is that its ephemeral and runs directly in your browser so if you close it whereas I thought of having a mini-server-like tinycore where I can get a gui mini server and can quickly open/close it with terminal and even heck modern browsers.
Everyone should try out tinycore just once imo. The simplicity of 21 MB is mind boggling to me. Makes one really wonder what bloat really is I suppose, definitely a fun experience.
Oh also I love alpine because I ran it in my phone using UserLand and I loved it although running python in alpine was a bit of mess on my phone and I think I ended up doing some wizard magic or something using g-compat in the end as well to run it. Although I think termux is pretty good and even better than UserLand in this context because UserLand runs emulated where Termux doesn't I guess but not sure.
True Alpine is pretty snappy. I don't like using it as muslc has given me headaches before. Arch is faster generally too but not as much. Maybe there's something with systemd stuff.
One could probably use VoidLinux or Gentoo with glibc I suppose if one might want leaner than arch but more heavier than arch
Although VoidLinux's iso size I think is larger than ArchLinux or something which doesn't make that much sense but I don't really know but both are good references to check out.
I like it. It's not perfect, but it's a good way to make sure that platforms will continue to be able to federate. They're evolving and things will improve. The experience is much better today, compared to some years ago.
I got a similar specced server for around 5$ I guess but it has 400 gigs of storage or 500 and I think all around it might be worth it.
But to be fair it was a deal for 3 months for 8$ with vouchers and everything and Its only been a month but after the 3 months, I would have to pay 5$/5Euros but I think it might be worth it, not sure but there is definitely this power of not leaving once you have started to own a vps or similar, that pull is definitely real :)
OVH is good company too, one of the cheapest overall in the markets. Some people themselves resell OVH servers or white-sell it, they are chill in this manner
I think one of the benefits of OVH is its unlimited egress policy. Upcloud and OVH are the only two which offer something similar I suppose and I think OVH is on the more cheaper side but Upcloud support team did feel phenomenal to me (I wish I was sponsored by them)
Pro tip but I have heard from people to talk to OVH through their twitter. I don't use twitter but yeah, also another idea for support could be to join their discord too, I think one of the core people once answered my simple question there (how to run docker in ovh servers/automate it) but they didn't answer some other question regarding the tos of ovh or similar which I can admit could be not sure if we should ask a developer about such things idk but overall all of these are pretty good options to pick!
There is just something fun about optimizing about server prices and support and just this grid-like optimization that takes place in your head when you are interested in things like this.
The bytehosting deal is good too! Oh btw lowendbox has a forum called lowendtalk where hosting providers etc. talk as well and show deals etc. and I got part of the community (you need to register and be verified manually but it wasn't hard)
Lowendbox is amazing. Glad we are talking about it as I recently joined it and the community's really supportive and honestly feels more so in the sharing spirit and I even talked about why people use lowendhosts etc. and got some pretty good answers imo
Although do be beware to stay away as there are some hosters which end up going completely down. So go with someone reputable as well and there is whole lore beneath in this forum :)
Racknerd,dedirock are usually recommended, I recommend https://serverdeals.cc/ etc. I have a list which I can recommend after being in the community for some time and here's some websites which I recommend for suggestions
Honestly I still recommend hetzner tho because these are some really really good deals but hetzner just has this reputation of more stability and I jsut have more faith in hetzner and its a "good enough" option imo and there are even some lowendhosts who kind of do share the fact that hetzner is very price competitive.
I personally had gotten a 2$/month 1TB vps hosting (yeah didn't really end up using it much aside from the shock factor/running yabs on it)
and also I got a 3 month 8bucks deal with netcup using their vouchers and everything to get 8 gigs of ram 4vcpus etc and honestly this was the best deal I ever saw but I will have to pay 5 bucks I guess after the 3 months end.
Most of it is remaining idle tho :< Are there any services I can run for the benefit of humanity (like running some self hosted services that can help anybody out there or smth?)
Let me know if you have any questions! I might be able to help you as I was active on lowendtalk till quite recently
How did these came to existence? Most of these offerings look basically identical. Is it ran by the same guy behind, or is it like a get rich quick network business stuff?
To be honest there is one instance that i know of where what ends up happening is that colocrossing a major vps provider does end up doing something like this (they used to be hosters/owners???? of lowendtalk/lowendbox)
Now another aspect is that the hosting economy is very mutual, they all start out somewhere and they are usually friendly towards each other. Most Hosting providers start out by either using reseller service directly or by colocating or by reselling dedicated servers which can be themselves of other providers
I don't know but the community is both cut throat and chill at the same time. It's strange to point this phenomenon but I think my point of their friendliness is something which depends and I don't know much about it but I once asked people on lowendtalk if I wanted to create a cloud provider myself and I got some responses and they were friendly so I am basing it off of that
Another aspect is that the market has already raced to the bottom super hard. Hetzner/OVH are really cheap, so to get even cheaper, you kinda have to be in the same pricing range I guess
Fun or not so fun fact but do you know that there have been cases of lowendbox providers to actually go shut down because they take these completely no profitable sense deal and actually lose money sometimes. VeloxMedia is a recent example of that and there is still controversy surrounding it.
There is also the fact that the scam industry in this department works as such:
Rent a really big server with lots of cores for a few months
Sell them unreasonably in LET for the year pricing or more
Then sell the company/be unable to provide/etc.
these I think are called as deadpools in the community.
Also regarding your comment behind same guy, there are sometimes family relations between people
as an example, racknerd I think is owned by the stepson of the owner of colocrossing and they I think using colocrossing themselves.
These have their own little drama stories and I think this is just the tip of iceberg as I just joined recently and probably digging through old archives.
I am also of a similar belief but I recently found exe.dev on hackernews and I am kind of play-testing with it and the dev seems active on hackernews and on the discord so I am definitely giving it a go
Gullos Hosting which has 128 Mb server for 3.5$/yearly and also for $4.49 you can still get a 256mb server from C-servers and $5.50 from byteVirt.
But also, there is fact that one can probably just buy hetzner servers or upcloud servers or similar idk. I will probably try to get some free services and then transition to hetzner/upcloud/netcup when my project needs more scalability/is shown to be of valuable to the general public/interests regarding it.
Honestly I got a 8 gig netcup server for 5$ and so I got it out of their limited deals section but I am thinking of just holding it and probably gonna use it extremely because with the rising prices etc., I think its good enough too as well
I just love yapping about server prices and comparing them etc. I think I just love a good deal lol.
Aw man. Great write-up and implementation of an exact thing I've started to build myself, except I was build it stateless on Cloudflare Workers. Love this!
"I would pay close attention to accessibility: forecasts would be in local languages..." There are many situations where somebody is interesting about the local weather but not speaking the local language. Why overwrite the users preferred language from the browser?
It doesn't. You can Always translate the text in your favourite language.
The project aims to send the forecasts to the users, so can't be multilingual.
Anyway, that's the reason why there are the emojis. Those ones are international.
This is awesome! Small projects like this that take off are fun to read.
Maybe I'm imaging it but FreeBSD really seems to have far less bloat than Linux distros and better latency. I just setup a $4/mo FreeBSD VM on Vultr with 1G RAM and 1vCPU and it's only using 12% of RAM with Caddy. A VM with 4GB of RAM and 4 vCPUs could serve a lot of traffic.
I'm wanting to create a personal blogging with a retro BBS-like web app with a text first interface with a multi-threaded Nim server + sqlite. I'm sure something exists already but it'd more for my own tinkering. No containers, no async, no javascript libraries. Just a small 4MB binary and FreeBSD. This posts encourages me on the FreeBSD route!
Unbloated distros exist, Alpine is one example. I was taken aback how snappy it is. Does everything without any undue delay. Merely logging in via SSH feels quicker as you don't have to wait a second for the prompt like on Ubuntu. apk is also super fast.
Alpine is really good for servers.
Man I love alpine even though I don't use it so much but alpine does hold a special place in my heart for some reason (and i think the reasons are good)
Tinycore is another one which holds a special place in my heart, partially because its the most no BS simple alpine-like os that I have seen which is rather focused on the consumer side, so you can get GUI systems super quickly and minimalist.
The minimalist tinycore iso with gui and terminals ran on 21-40 MB :) let that sink in
They showed as 0.0% or 0.1% on my 8 gig computer.
I used tinycore to take my really old laptop which my brother used to game on mostly and was super dead, it was a dell mini pc with intel atom 1 gig of ram 32 bit, probably 10-15 years old
I ran tinycore on it with no problem and ended up with wifi access and then even ran modern firefox browser and ended up even running a website like https://pomodorokitty.com/ on it
Man,do i love them both.
I genuinely just wanted to create a service which could just boot tinycore gui servers in the browser perhaps via novnc for people to play with but I seriously wondered who might pay for the project
Oh btw oops forget that you can already do that by just downloading the iso of tinycore and then going to copy.sh/v86
In fact that inspired me to create the project but one of the issues of copy.sh/v86 is that its ephemeral and runs directly in your browser so if you close it whereas I thought of having a mini-server-like tinycore where I can get a gui mini server and can quickly open/close it with terminal and even heck modern browsers.
Everyone should try out tinycore just once imo. The simplicity of 21 MB is mind boggling to me. Makes one really wonder what bloat really is I suppose, definitely a fun experience.
Oh also I love alpine because I ran it in my phone using UserLand and I loved it although running python in alpine was a bit of mess on my phone and I think I ended up doing some wizard magic or something using g-compat in the end as well to run it. Although I think termux is pretty good and even better than UserLand in this context because UserLand runs emulated where Termux doesn't I guess but not sure.
True Alpine is pretty snappy. I don't like using it as muslc has given me headaches before. Arch is faster generally too but not as much. Maybe there's something with systemd stuff.
One could probably use VoidLinux or Gentoo with glibc I suppose if one might want leaner than arch but more heavier than arch
Although VoidLinux's iso size I think is larger than ArchLinux or something which doesn't make that much sense but I don't really know but both are good references to check out.
Thank you!
BTW, how do you feel about ActivityPub in general?
I like it. It's not perfect, but it's a good way to make sure that platforms will continue to be able to federate. They're evolving and things will improve. The experience is much better today, compared to some years ago.
4 euro servers are good.
I got a similar specced server for around 5$ I guess but it has 400 gigs of storage or 500 and I think all around it might be worth it.
But to be fair it was a deal for 3 months for 8$ with vouchers and everything and Its only been a month but after the 3 months, I would have to pay 5$/5Euros but I think it might be worth it, not sure but there is definitely this power of not leaving once you have started to own a vps or similar, that pull is definitely real :)
OVH is good company too, one of the cheapest overall in the markets. Some people themselves resell OVH servers or white-sell it, they are chill in this manner
I think one of the benefits of OVH is its unlimited egress policy. Upcloud and OVH are the only two which offer something similar I suppose and I think OVH is on the more cheaper side but Upcloud support team did feel phenomenal to me (I wish I was sponsored by them)
Pro tip but I have heard from people to talk to OVH through their twitter. I don't use twitter but yeah, also another idea for support could be to join their discord too, I think one of the core people once answered my simple question there (how to run docker in ovh servers/automate it) but they didn't answer some other question regarding the tos of ovh or similar which I can admit could be not sure if we should ask a developer about such things idk but overall all of these are pretty good options to pick!
There is just something fun about optimizing about server prices and support and just this grid-like optimization that takes place in your head when you are interested in things like this.
> German provider with 4 shared cores, 4GB of RAM, 120GB of SSD disk space, and a 1Gbit/sec internet connection
Where on earth did he find €4 VPS with these specs. For example Hetzner's cheapest VPS has 2 shared vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 40 GB NVME SSD.
The cheapest I found is https://contabo.com/en/vps/ but it still doesn't have 1 gb/s connection with that price.
Edit: typo
this: https://www.netcup.com/de/server/vps/vps-500-g11s
This one was slightly above 4 EUR (but without any minimum contract duration)
Here are actually the 4 EUR and below offers: https://www.netcup.com/de/server/guenstige-vserver-angebote
Funnily I on first sight could not find the same page in english.
https://www.lowendbox.com/ is a popular source.
I came here to fight you but there are some low end boxes with lots of ram and disk for pretty cheap!
Found this as an example: https://lowendbox.com/blog/black-friday-bytehosting-is-here-...
The bytehosting deal is good too! Oh btw lowendbox has a forum called lowendtalk where hosting providers etc. talk as well and show deals etc. and I got part of the community (you need to register and be verified manually but it wasn't hard)
Lowendbox is amazing. Glad we are talking about it as I recently joined it and the community's really supportive and honestly feels more so in the sharing spirit and I even talked about why people use lowendhosts etc. and got some pretty good answers imo
Although do be beware to stay away as there are some hosters which end up going completely down. So go with someone reputable as well and there is whole lore beneath in this forum :)
Racknerd,dedirock are usually recommended, I recommend https://serverdeals.cc/ etc. I have a list which I can recommend after being in the community for some time and here's some websites which I recommend for suggestions
https://serverdeals.cc/
https://vpspricetracker.com/
https://getdeploying.com/
Honestly I still recommend hetzner tho because these are some really really good deals but hetzner just has this reputation of more stability and I jsut have more faith in hetzner and its a "good enough" option imo and there are even some lowendhosts who kind of do share the fact that hetzner is very price competitive.
I personally had gotten a 2$/month 1TB vps hosting (yeah didn't really end up using it much aside from the shock factor/running yabs on it)
and also I got a 3 month 8bucks deal with netcup using their vouchers and everything to get 8 gigs of ram 4vcpus etc and honestly this was the best deal I ever saw but I will have to pay 5 bucks I guess after the 3 months end.
Most of it is remaining idle tho :< Are there any services I can run for the benefit of humanity (like running some self hosted services that can help anybody out there or smth?)
Let me know if you have any questions! I might be able to help you as I was active on lowendtalk till quite recently
How did these came to existence? Most of these offerings look basically identical. Is it ran by the same guy behind, or is it like a get rich quick network business stuff?
To be honest there is one instance that i know of where what ends up happening is that colocrossing a major vps provider does end up doing something like this (they used to be hosters/owners???? of lowendtalk/lowendbox)
Now another aspect is that the hosting economy is very mutual, they all start out somewhere and they are usually friendly towards each other. Most Hosting providers start out by either using reseller service directly or by colocating or by reselling dedicated servers which can be themselves of other providers
I don't know but the community is both cut throat and chill at the same time. It's strange to point this phenomenon but I think my point of their friendliness is something which depends and I don't know much about it but I once asked people on lowendtalk if I wanted to create a cloud provider myself and I got some responses and they were friendly so I am basing it off of that
Another aspect is that the market has already raced to the bottom super hard. Hetzner/OVH are really cheap, so to get even cheaper, you kinda have to be in the same pricing range I guess
Fun or not so fun fact but do you know that there have been cases of lowendbox providers to actually go shut down because they take these completely no profitable sense deal and actually lose money sometimes. VeloxMedia is a recent example of that and there is still controversy surrounding it.
There is also the fact that the scam industry in this department works as such:
Rent a really big server with lots of cores for a few months
Sell them unreasonably in LET for the year pricing or more
Then sell the company/be unable to provide/etc.
these I think are called as deadpools in the community.
Also regarding your comment behind same guy, there are sometimes family relations between people
as an example, racknerd I think is owned by the stepson of the owner of colocrossing and they I think using colocrossing themselves.
These have their own little drama stories and I think this is just the tip of iceberg as I just joined recently and probably digging through old archives.
buyvm used to have one (not with those specs) for like $5 a year with 256 MB I used to love buying one or two of those for simple stuff.
I am also of a similar belief but I recently found exe.dev on hackernews and I am kind of play-testing with it and the dev seems active on hackernews and on the discord so I am definitely giving it a go
Gullos Hosting which has 128 Mb server for 3.5$/yearly and also for $4.49 you can still get a 256mb server from C-servers and $5.50 from byteVirt.
But also, there is fact that one can probably just buy hetzner servers or upcloud servers or similar idk. I will probably try to get some free services and then transition to hetzner/upcloud/netcup when my project needs more scalability/is shown to be of valuable to the general public/interests regarding it.
Honestly I got a 8 gig netcup server for 5$ and so I got it out of their limited deals section but I am thinking of just holding it and probably gonna use it extremely because with the rising prices etc., I think its good enough too as well
I just love yapping about server prices and comparing them etc. I think I just love a good deal lol.
> now is a 4 euro per month VPS in Milano, Italy - 4 shared cores, 8 GB RAM and 75GB disk space.
He didn't - he found a better specced one in Italy for that price
Exactly. Same price but better specs. The current provider is OVH and they recently started to host VMs in Italy.
there's €1 and €2 VPS too: https://www.strato.nl/server/vps-linux/ (not sure what the quality is but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
Aw man. Great write-up and implementation of an exact thing I've started to build myself, except I was build it stateless on Cloudflare Workers. Love this!
"I would pay close attention to accessibility: forecasts would be in local languages..." There are many situations where somebody is interesting about the local weather but not speaking the local language. Why overwrite the users preferred language from the browser?
It doesn't. You can Always translate the text in your favourite language. The project aims to send the forecasts to the users, so can't be multilingual. Anyway, that's the reason why there are the emojis. Those ones are international.
Such a cool project. Thanks for building it. Amazing what one can do with a tiny VPS.
great write up and breakdown of the project. you can do a lot with a small VPS
thanks!
Amazing project I understand why FediFollows helped it get more visibility https://social.growyourown.services/@FediFollows/11565141936...
Thank you!
Awesome project! I’ve always dreamed of making my own weather service so this is a great inspiration.
Thanks!
Ooh just what I needed, thanks!
thank you!