Just an FYI getting a vps or dedicated server that is fast enough for Minecraft modpacks is going to be fairly expensive. It might be cheaper to get shared hosting for the MC server and a separate vps for the docker stuff.
this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2025
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Or if you have reliable home internet, just get/reuse a small PC and host at home.
But if you don't have a ton of users, you can host on a pretty cheap VPS.
Also if you do go this route and are concerned about privacy and security you can get a cheap vps then setup a VPN (wireguard probably) on the vps and have your home server connect to that. Then you can forward the vps ports to the VPN IP of your home server. This means that you don't need to have port forwarding or even a dedicated IP at home and users don't get your home IP. Keep in mind you need a vps that is relatively close to your house to keep the latency down as this setup will add twice the latency between home and the vps to the connection.
Oracle Free Tier. Works like a charm for me for 2 years. Really free, really working. No matter what shit company Oracle is.
Just a PSA, never ever EVER request deletion of an Oracle free tier if there is any possibility you might want one in the future.
You can delete/remove instances or whatever as you desire, but you won't be able to get a second free tier account even if the first is completely deleted.
Their free tiers look nice, but I've read that your server must stay above X% CPU usage average to prevent deletion, is that true?
No.
I got one. It's just too slow for what I need and can't do webrtc because of a hardware limitation.
Did you upgrade your account to a paid one? I've read that this might help to precent from being deleted. Even with a paid-as-you-go account you're able to use the free tiers.
I'm on completely free, no deletionm I'm using it to run Wireguard tunnel to my home network, after I was put behind CGNAT. Domain name pointed to the VPS, it redirects ports to my home.
Thanks. Yes I am currently doing the same but was wondering if my account will be deleted at some point.
Interesting, maybe I'll play around with that. I'm currently on a simple $5/month Hetzner VPS which does everything I need it to do, but maybe I'll try using it for experimental stuff (considering a Rust build server, for example).
What are the specs like?
24gb memory and 4 OCPU . the CPU doesnt sound like much, but if its using the ampere back end and not the amd micro, the CPU performance scales up with demand (to a point).
I have two containers running, one using 16gb memory and another using 4gb, they each have one cpu and they perform fine for what they do.
Do you know what is the transfer bandwidth limit on these machines? Wondering if they can be used for setting up a wireguard node.
Ok thanks not bad! How much storage?
Hmm... Let me look.
Edit: each instance gets 50gb boot volume, I can log in and confirm if you like.
Not bad for free. Appreciate you checking.
You can get a quad core ARM 24 gb ram vpn for free on oracle cloud on their free tier.
They refused my visa during the onboarding, a bit surprising
Credit card? Have things changed? I have two containers hosted there and I never gave mine.
Tried a few weeks ago. They wanted my card to check that I am not a bot (I am fine with that), the 0usd transaction succeeded but then I got an error message.
God knows what they'd have flagged. I was trying to sign up to sendgrid's free tier to test their SMTP server and got instabanned before I even got the verification email.
At least they helped me prove how crappy they are 👍
Any caveats to it?
Just don't try to run huge amounts of bandwidth or try to pirate content on it and you'll be fine. It does need a credit card on file, but it cannot charge it unless you explicity disable free tier.
Cool. I'd use very little bandwidth, and my other resource usage would be quite bursty, but almost zero most of the time.
Already got one of those but thanks
I'm reasonably happy with Hetzner, except the recent gutting of transfer quotas in their non-EU data centers. They're still super competitive though, so I'll probably stick with them.
I have no idea about Minecraft hosting though.
I've had this site bookmarked for a while, but I've not actually evaluated them: https://lowendbox.com/
I've used EthernetServers .com and they have had good support, good support response times, and overall good service. I would gladly work with them again.
Before I grew enough spare capacity at home to self host our family’s server, I was using MCPro hosting. It was fine and at the time, cheap. I understand they’ve been bought by Apex now though. No experience with them.
I've been using Contabo. German company, several geographic locations for your nodes, reasonably priced.
I was happy with Cloudfanatic.
Silly question but isn’t using a VPS the exact opposite of “self hosted”?
The opposite of self-hosted would be managed service.
You run it yourself at your own location however you want it
Vs
Someone runs it for you at their location. However the want it
VPS is someone loans you a VM at their location that you run yourself however you want to.
It's still relevant to self-hosted because you still have to do all the work, you were just using their network, power, air conditioning, hardware and fire suppression. You're still in the hook for installs and patches, configuration, and software issues.
For me, self-hosting is about staying in control over your software and data, so I think hosting in a VPS still fits the bill, even if it isn't the way most people go about it
Aren’t you partially not in control? If that hardware gets nuked some how then you’re compromised
True, but you'd still have a lot more control over your stuff than say, some Microsoft or Google product
Sure, but with proper backups, you can be up and running somewhere else quickly, minutes even if you script it.
I mostly use it to get around CGNAT, but it totally makes sense for something that needs to be externally available anyway, like a Minecraft server.
The opposite of VPS is more like “home lab”.
Managing a VPS yourself still counts as self-hosting.
This is one of those things where I think that purity might conflict with progress. I am currently using a VPS in a privacy-friendly country to host some stuff, and I am trying to move more of my needs there. I can easily try to host things at my house(and I do to a limited extent, I have a VPN I run through a VPS to connect my devices together to accomplish this), but dealing with the constraints of non-professional hardware management and a residential internet connection is frustrating. This frustration has in the past prevented me from reducing my use of services where I know they are farming my data, and would probably honor illegal and warrant-less data requests from government agencies. At least with IaaS, I give them money in exchange for a virtual machine, vs SaaS where I give them possibly money but more importantly permission to do whatever they want with my highly structured data(far easer to data mine a easily searchable database of PII vs a filesystem of unknown structure).
Even outside of tech, I have often found that my sense of purity gets in the way of actually making progress towards my values. Use the VPS if it will get you to stop using worse things.
I've been happy with racknerd. They usually run specials that are pretty reasonable: https://www.racknerd.com/NewYear/
I did have one rather long outage of about 48 hours once. The host running my VPS had a nic fail. They got it fixed and it's been solid ever since.
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I just swapped from ssdNodes to MassiveGRID and I'm pretty happy with them so far (I'm sure there are much better VPS hosts out there). They just extended the sale they posted on lownedboxes through the weekend, so if you pay for 3 years, you get a 4th for free and you also lock-in the pricing for after that 4 year period, too. This is the thread.
If you do decide to order (before Monday) make sure you sign up and make a post in the lowendbox forum thread to get your extra year.
The only real downside to them is they only offer 1Gbps connections for right now (they're upgrading so you can order multi-Gbps connections in the future), but I'm able to max out the connection: http://i.xno.dev/u/6ZM52h.png
These are the specs: http://i.xno.dev/u/qJeLjE.png And this is proof of the 4th year: http://i.xno.dev/u/0xN6Z0.png
So I ended up paying $141.28 for 4 years which is $2.94/mo. Very worth it, IMO considering the specs as something comparable on DigitalOcean is $48/mo.
Thank you. I was paying that yearly for my VPS with half the specs.
Ya, like I said. I jumped on them because of the price. The hardware isn't the most powerful in the world, but to run my hosted services it's been excellent so far. I'm super happy and I'm paying next to nothing which is great.
Now my domain costs more than my hosting T__T
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