I found myself wondering much the same recently. I can recall that at one time it seemed like you couldn't even go very far in technical circles without tripping over colo ads for places that would take desktop/tower boxes as well as rackmount servers. Back then I wasn't interested in that but after making some light use of VPSs (including some truly light VPS VMs, I had one of the old $5 a *year* Frantech/BuyVM 128MB RAM, shared single cpu core, and single digit gigabytes of disk VPSs, which I put both Gitolite and (iirc) OpenVPN on and since that VPN server was only for my personal laptop when away from home and gitolite is quite lightweight I could connect to the VPN, push some files into a repo, and barely see the usage gauges on the admin page move. Of course this was close to a decade ago now and they don't offer a $5 VPS anymore. Now it's a 512 MB, 1 core, 10 GB storage KVM based VPS for $20 a year and 1GB RAM starts at $3.50. I've been happy with them, I've not pushed the VPSs I've had too hard, still just light usage like remote git repos and single user VPN. (I certainly don't pitch them for commissions, yet I have an affiliate link
https://my.frantech.ca/aff.php?aff=2776 but I've never spammed and looking it up I see only one person has ever sign up with it, but hey it finally hit the minimum payout so I can do my next couple of account renewals using it) That said it's not uncommon to go to their website and find that you can't actually buy a VPS because they're not one of the VPS companies that cheerfully oversells their servers.
That said, when I've looked into the possibility of doing something like running a fediverse server I see even personal servers or small servers with only a dozen or so users running into issues with small VPS accounts (largely it seems from running out of disk space, caching all the images people put in posts adds up over time even at a megabyte a pop -- and boy does the 80s kid still deep inside me boggle at the idea of a one megabyte image file being considered small), which was the main reason I poked around seeing if I could find a local colo that actually posted a price list rather than just having a link to message a member of their sales staff. The feeling I got back a few years ago was that the places I was finding web pages for were looking for business customers who would be hosting multiple servers and have an accounting department to process invoices and purchase orders. How many of them are still friendly to the idea of someone just dropping off a single Nuc or small desktop/tower case to plug into power and ethernet, rather than renting out a half rack or more in a cage?
> On 11/20/2023 5:13 AM MST David Schwartz via PLUG-discuss <plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:
>
>
> I’ve got a Windows VPS server somewhere but prices are rather high for a decently fast box, so I’m thinking of getting a little NUC box. It would be fine for dev purposes, but I’d like to be able to access it outside of my home LAN.
>
> However, I’m using T-Mobile Home Internet, and it blocks all incoming ports, so I’d need to set up another box (I think?) that runs ngenx or something else to support reverse proxies.
>
> It would be a whole lot easier to just plug it into a co-lo rack, but the only things I’ve found are well over $100/mo.
>
> Is there anything cheap around the Phx area that startups can use for basic dev work? (This has to be Windows for now.)
>
> -David Schwartz
>
>
>
>
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