Battle of cheap Cloud options; Digital Ocean, Civo , Hetzner and ScaleWay
They say everything is in the cloud now and cloud is cheap or simple enough to use. The big boys dominate the space and dry you up for they are expensive and too complex for small projects. But there are cheaper options to run your projects or host simple website if you want and one of the most well-know of them is Digital Ocean with a very easy to use console to have you up and running in no time. The smallest package starts from 5USD which sound cheap If you live in US or equivalent. In search of cheaper services found another service called Civo with similar model, same packages and they are giving away 50USD signing up bonus. Signed up but the ssh connection had so much lag I gave up on using it for free even, they have their instances in UK probably making them a good option for user in Europe. Where as Digital Ocean has multiple locations to pick from something that makes it a better for user experience coupled with its Marketplace for a one-click install when provisioning an instance. Recently (yesterday :P) came across another service provider called Hetzner, its a German company with servers in EU in 3 places and their packages start from 2.49euro + VAT (if you are outside EU you don’t have to pay VAT). That is almost half the price at 2.79USD. My first concern was what if it had similar ssh lag Civo had but to my surprise it was pretty smooth sailing and their console is very similar to the other 2, few clicks and you have your server up and running. They provide twice the RAM and 20 times more data bandwidth. German engineering is know for its performance so I moved my bot UltronEx to it 😉. Hetzner seem to be performing well with available dashboards for monitoring and decent enough options to run small to medium workloads. So for anyone looking for cloud hosting or a work station in cloud can have a look in to these I hope it helps you. If you know of any other solutions similar or cheaper rates let me know also.
Came across ScaleWay which seems to offer 2.99 euro/month + VAT a decent 2vCPU options with 2GB RAM and 20GB disk and a transfer limit of 100Mbits/s with no mention of transfer capacity like others. This is still a cheaper option than Digital Ocean and Civo for twice the compute and memory. Haven’t tried it so open to feedback about their service and ease of use.
