Using a low-end-box VPS

A while back I came across a site called LowEndBox, a "marketplace" that advertises for hosting companies.. and saw a couple of "cheap" hosting providers. This led me to cut down recurring passive costs, and paying less for stuff I don't REALLY need - but still want, as "nice-to-have"

Prior to the switch, I was using Vultr, a cloud hosting service very similar to DigitalOcean, which was giving me a box for about $2.75 USD per month.. Absolutely brilliant service, and support, no issues at all. Would recommend if speed was an important factor!

My Research

On my search for something "better suited" for me, I came across managed & self-managed hosting. Managed hosting was out of the equation for me since its way too overkill (a dedicated server) for what I needed, and way more expensive. In self-managed hosting, there were a few options like KVM and OpenVZ (the most common ones), my understanding of these two, is basically a technology that shares the underlying server (I imagine something like this ) into separate containerised "private servers"..

One more thing, there are several "control panels" (technically called Virtualization Management Platforms) to manage the box (SolusVM, Virtualizor to name a few..). Hudson Valley Host uses OpenVZ which does the job pretty well!

Anyway, so I switched to Hudson Valley Host, which had a really attractive one-time annual payment package for $15 USD, in comparison I was paying about $33 USD per year (and the AUD rate conversion keeps fluctuating)..

My take on Hudson Valley Host

Since this is a bit on the cheaper tier of VPS, the service is as expected, but still pretty good, I found the support team very responsive (average 2 hr wait between support ticket enquiries). The box I chose came with SolusVM, and HDD backed storage, not the fastest I know..

Things you should know

• You need to know what you're doing, and what you want ; while signing up I asked for a VPS provisioned with CentOS 7, however it came with CentOS 6. I had to reach out to support, and they suggested I powerdown the box, and set it up with Centos 7. However, at the time I didn't have access to the credentials to "manage" the box, upon asking, I was able to get into the control panel to manage to VPS and re-install the OS.
• They don't provide nameservers, when I contacted support about this they very flatly said its not something they provide. I was in a bit of a pickle since I almost always relied on the host's nameservers for the domain to point to the host. More on that later...

Next Iteration/Goal

Next time I would like to try a server with a faster storage medium. I'm currently eyeing https://lowendbox.com/blog/racknerd-ryzen-vps-with-nvme-storage-from-15-year-in-new-york-chicago-and-san-jose/