Hetzner has auctions on dedicated servers that can be really good. But if you just need a vps, check out Contabo.
this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2026
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Also netcup has really good deals during the winter holidays
I think I get those emails twice a year. And it's usually same price and double storage for the VPSes. Can recommend netcup.de as well. They used to be a bit cheaper than today, but I guess every hoster increased price within the last year.
The RAM and Storage costs have skyrocketed due to AI. My home server is running 64GB because I just happened to have a kit laying around from an old project.
Yes. I've been somewhat lucky as well. Upgraded my homeserver to 48GB to run a few virtual machines and maxed out my old laptop well before prices skyrocketed. Got to check if I still pay the ~8€ a month for my netcup VPS or if they increased price for existing customers as well...
ionos.de has VPS for 1€/month, which are not that bad. Server locations are Spain or Germany afaik.
The have some more European locations. I got mine in France.
For actual hardware: Hetzner. For VPS there are many choices. Digitalocean is cheap and easy, has european data centers, and some decent value add services.
Are they an american company? European data centers mean nothing if they are an american company.
Oracle has an always free tier which provides two x64 AMD based virtual machines. They are more or less cloud based calculators in terms of performance, but out of experience I can tell you it is more than sufficient for a few docker containers.
European locations are available.
yeah but then you're interacting with oracle
hard pass
Problem of free tier is just to entice devs in the hope that one of them likes the infrastructure and works at a whale
If you use the free tier too much they close it because you used it too much and exceeded their fair use policy
If instead you don't use it enough, they close it for inactivity
I'm using the Oracle free tier to host pangolin and it is down constantly.
One of my two machines crashed a lot until I moved two Containers to my local server. They are quite small in regards to RAM and at their limit quite fast. Maybe check that.
Also I read somewhere that you could enter credit card details and this kinda upgrades your account in their system though you still do not pay. Something to do with throttling free machines in favor of paid customers.
I thought the ram was fine (the shell is still accessible from their web ui, just non responsive from outside), but I'll double check.
That second possibility sounds like exactly the kind of nonsense I would expect from Oracle.
I run one of these free cloud vms as a reverse proxy for my reverse proxy. It runs rathole, which my homelab rathole client connects to, and it patches traffic through ports 80/443 into my homelab to my caddy container. My home ip is never made public and I don't have to forward any ports at home or worry about traversing NAT. It's a neat setup, but rathole hasn't been updated in some time and I'm looking to replace it with an actively developed alternative like gost or connet.
I tried that and my account got randomly deleted
Hetzner works very well for me.
Hetzner or Netcup
I’ve been using massivegrid. I think I currently pay about $20 a year with a pretty decent about of network. Works for me so far.
Free.
Use Cloudflare to point directly to your server. As a layer of security on top, ensure only certain emails or certain domains are able to get through to them.
I've done this about 1 year ago for my family and works flawlessly. Exposed Nextcloud, uptimekuma, immich, emby, etc. About 8 services.
Cloudflare Tunnel is the best. No need to open any ports, and it works on any internet connection.
And it automatically does HA. Reuse the key on another server and if one goes down it automatically switches to the next one
(Of course the application needs to support this, if you do this with a normal database it will break immediately)
Contabo is cheap but has some weird quirks. I pay about five euros a month. My server got mysteriously rolled by two days and they denied anything happened to it. I restored from backups but it was odd.
ovh dedicated kimsufi servers are deadly cheap https://eco.ovhcloud.com/en/kimsufi/
hetzner server auction https://www.hetzner.com/sb/
Hetzner is pretty cheap, and have datacenters all over (I mainly use the one in finland). For your usecase, a very cheap VPS shoyld do. If you want a physical machine I can recommend their server auction.
If shared hosting isn't a problem Uberspace might be interesting. I used it as long as i didn't solely self host.
You give up some control, but you gotta check out https://www.pikapods.com/
On a per-app basis, the price can’t be beat, especially at this level of convenience. I host exactly uptime kuma and beszel on there. The owners are also super responsive to things like adding more env vars.
https://www.lunanode.com/ Only one data center in Canada, but affordable and have used them for years without issues. VMs starting at $3.5/month
Is hosting on a server at your home an option?
Not really, as I want to watch my services from afar to be notified even if my home internet connection goes down.
OP said they wanted some stuff outside their home LAN which is very understandable for certain things, service checks which they mentioned specifically.
Any good cheap VPS for something like Netbird server or Headscale with servers available in the United States.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| HA | Home Assistant automation software |
| ~ | High Availability |
| NAT | Network Address Translation |
| VPS | Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) |
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 8 acronyms.
[Thread #257 for this comm, first seen 27th Apr 2026, 06:00] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Glesys (Sweden) has some affordable vps options.
https://glesys.com/products/compute-category-page/kvm-vps/
€22 for 2core/2gb/20ssd? That's not affordable
After checking the german datacenter vps offerings I realize that Glesys can't compete.