What cloud VPS host is the best for privacy and security? I want to self host stuff for myself some tools. Mental Outlaw make a video last year about self hosting your own VPN with a service called Vultr but back in December vultr added to their TOS that they own what you host and a bunch of other scary stuff. So I don’t trust Vultr anymore. I don’t see recommended vps hosts on privacyguides website. So what do you guys think I should use to self host various things like a VPN, Nextcloud, and so on.
You can also get an old PC without a gpu and hook it up to a domain via dyndns or similar. Or just wireguard to it. You’d have higher upfront costs, but very small running costs, so it will be worth it at some point and you fully controll the data on it.
Electricity isn’t free and nor is your time, you are never going to beat commercial VPS hosters on price.
Looking at my bills, my cluster server costs me ~15€ per month in electricity.
It has:
- 4x6 arm cores
- 4x6 GB RAM
- 8TB HDD storage
- 3TB nvme storage
As soon as you link me a VPS offer with comparable specs, but lower monthly cost, I am switching.
Well, how long do you expect the cluster to last, and how much did it cost? We need to factor that in to understand the true monthly cost of the cluster.
I expect it to last for over 10years.
It has been running for 2 so far.
The total material cost was somewhere between 800 and 1000€.
For comparison, here is an ARM vps https://www.netcup.eu/vserver/arm-server/ if you scroll down a bit and add 8TB block storage to it you can see that the storage alone would cost just shy of 100€ per month. That would rake up the same bill in less than a year.
Okay, so €1000 over 120 months, that’s another €8.34/month, plus the €15/month in electricity costs. A total of €23.34/month.
So yeah, you’re not going to get those specs at that price on a VPS today, but there are a lot of caveats here.
- 10 years is a very generous prediction for how long this cluster will last. In my experience, hardware that runs 24/7 lasts about 5 years before something happens requiring replacement.
- Even if your hardware does last 10 years, Moore’s Law suggests that it will be completely obsolete well before then. Chances are good that your Cluster’s specs will be rentable in the cloud for less than you are paying for electricity at some point before 10 years passes.
- Resource usage determines how useful the cluster actually is. Are you using all 24GB of RAM? Are you using all that disk space? If not, you’re paying for something you’re not using.
- Maintenance. Especially with an HDD, you need to expect parts to break. How much do you budget for that?
- Connectivity. Is your home Internet connection suitable for your needs? Is it worth the performance degradation your projects might have on your home network? If you subscribe to a second Internet connection for your hosted servers, how much does that add to your monthly bill?
- Security. Are you hosting anything publicly accessible from your home network? Can you trust that what you are hosting won’t provide bad actors access to your network? How much extra will it cost to segment your network to be more secure?
At least with a VPS you can rent only what you need when you need it, have a dedicated multi-gigabit network connection, and watch server specs increase and costs decrease as scalable hardware capacity improves over time, all while keeping your home network safely out of the picture.
all good points to consider for sure.
I won’t go into all of them, but to summarize, it works perfectly for me.
The cool thing about a cluster is the upgrade path. It started with just two blades, but as I ran more docker containers and went out of resources, I just bought more. Am now up to 6 and there are still 2 free slots if I need it.
Storage I definitely overprovisioned but it will get used up eventually, that one is a bit more tricky to smoothly upgrade. Each blade has one nvme slot, but for bulk storage I have external raid enclosures, which is somewhat awkward.
Like you implied, it all depends on your need. If all you need is to run some private services, as OP is asking about, a bunch of SBCs or an old second hand office computer will do just fine and be very nicely priced compared to renting a similarly specced VPS.
Those are not VPS specs, that is more the kind where you would get a dedicated hardware server at a hoster. Hosting your own becomes much more viable the larger your operation becomes.
Mkay, then lets check out a VPS equivalent then:
A raspberry pi 4, with an average CPU load of 100% 24/7 would draw ~4kWh per month, which would cost me 1,50€ per month in electricity.
Again, a cheap VPS with specs in the rpi4 range costst about 5€ per month. After about 1,5 years running a rpi4 would become cheaper than renting a VPS.
Edit: after calculating it myself, I found this tool online https://tools.picockpit.com/powercost/ which veryfies my napkin math.
Cloudserver might still be doing the $10 a year deal where you get a cpu core and some ram and hard drive space.
It’s hard to beat that price even if you already have the pi. And the vps runs amd64 binaries instead of needing everything built out for arm.
That’s a load of crap. Anything you have to subscribe to will turn out to be more expensive than owning at some point. And even if that was not the case, the monetary value that you give your data is what should determine how much you should pay, up front or over time.
If one forgoes contracts and is trusting, anybody can host their private files on my private, self-hosted servers. But only if it’s sensitive documents. Like the stuff you wouldn’t want to host at a standard online host.
Completely free, aint that just a sweet deal?
Personally I find time and money tertiary to privacy and would pay 10 times the standard rate for a truly secure host.
Unfortunately they don’t exist so I learned to self host encrypted servers with VPN access on private infrastructure.
Beat use of time and money ever.
Which is why I said “on price”. Obviously that is only one of the factors but don’t kid yourself into thinking that your local server will ever be cheaper. It might have many other advantages but price just won’t be one of them.
No one has mentioned Njalla. I haven’t used their server offerings, but they are probably the best for privacy.
Run a home server and VPN to it through a VPS if needed, so they see nothing. E2EE everything.
You need to trust your provider. If you choose a bigger one, chances are you are a bit safer. Those kind of providers make big bucks on companies, so if they harm the trust of their customers they are out of business. You could try to choose software which implements E2EE and zero-trust to be safer, but those are not available on all software categories. VPS providers have access to all your stuff. So it’s all up to you which provider you trust. I would prefer a bigger name too some obscure little basement hoster.
I would recommend ADTAQ. They’re a small anti-corpo provider from Gibraltar who built their whole business remotely in an ultra-cheap datacenter in Quincy, Washington. Very reliable, very affordable, but with their only datacenter in WA, you probably don’t want this if you live too far away.
A little bit more expensive, but with a richer product line and by-the-hour pricing is RamNode, with very cheap offerings hosted around the world.
I think ADTAQ is exactly what I am looking for and $10 a tb is a very good deal. If they are the “Anti-Walmart” of VPS’s then I am sold.
The best thing to do is not trust your vps. You can use different credentials than those you normally would, connect through a vpn to obscure your identity (questionably useful depending on how you paid) and use public/private key pairs where no private key material or certificates end up on your vps.
I’m not sure of a true “zero trust” method to secure a virtualized computer when someone else has lower level software access and physical control over the hardware it’s running on.
Check out Njalla, Kyun, 1984 Hosting and OrangeWebsite. I think they all accept crypto payments (including Monero!) BitLaunch is a reseller for Linode and Vultr that allows you to pay with crypto, and hostingbydesign is a Hetzner reseller that doesn’t require KYC.
I would look into aruba vps; i remember it being decent; but dont take my word for it.
Hetzner has a pretty decent privacy policy afaik.
