Run OpenBSD on DigitalOcean for $4/month

(nil.wallyjones.com)

54 points | by speckx 2 hours ago

10 comments

  • 8by3 2 hours ago
    I've always gone with Vultr (vultr.com) for BSD VMs, its properly supported by them and while I've never hard verified this, they seem like a nice smaller player. Like they have offered Open/Free BSD VM's for > 10 years, kind of nice.
    • SpecialistK 31 minutes ago
      They were very helpful when one of the AMD firmware patches in 7.3 caused my VPS to not boot. They even offered to apply a manual fix until patch -015 was available which fixed it.
    • SoftTalker 1 hour ago
      I used buyvm.net for BSD a while back. Didn't have any issues, and the few times I contacted their support they were quick to respond and helpful.

      rootbsd.net before that, but they don't seem to exist anymore.

    • darksim905 1 hour ago
      The admins have access to your data and unless things have changed, that isn't monitored. They also bend to NSLs like any other provider. What they charge vs what things cost hurts.
      • thesuitonym 40 minutes ago
        Any cloud compute vendor will have access to your data unless you encrypt it.
  • githubholobeat 1 hour ago
    You can even go completely free with Cloudflare tunnel with your own office/home hardware. I have a simple web running on my old Raspberry Pi 3 + nginx + golang web app. Also with ssh access to the Pi.
    • xp84 35 minutes ago
      Yes, the cloudflare SSH tunneling works well -- though I think the fact that SSL is provisioned means it'll show up in the cert transparency log, possibly attracting unwanted attention to probe my home systems.

      I ended up turning that off and switching to Tailscale. Tailscale is set to advertise my home IP range (I chose one that's not 192.168 based which avoids problems with range conflicts). So I can just connect to Tailscale and connect to 10.X.Y.Z as though I'm home. If I want memorable hostnames I can point DNS records to those private IPs.

    • altmanaltman 9 minutes ago
      You still have to pay for electricity. If you consider that "completely free" then paying $4 per month should also be considered "completely free".
  • dchest 20 minutes ago
    A warning about openbsdhandbook[.]com - this website has completely incorrect information for some things. Like hallucinated, even though I think it was created before LLMs.
  • FLeXMurphy 40 minutes ago
    DO burned me recently due to their unwillingness to handle DDOS attacks: "The best we can do is change your IP." Thanks guys.

    Switched to OVH immediately.

    • forinti 38 minutes ago
      I tried to warn them that they were hosting a phishing site once and they weren't very receptive.

      Otherwise, I hosted a site with them for years and all went well.

    • crest 26 minutes ago
      They're also too stupid to understand that they've been dropping UDP datagrams with src port == dst port and < 1024. This obviously breaks IPsec IKE. I showed them dummy traffic captured with netcat and tcpdump, but they refused to admit they caused the problem. They repeatedly claimed to see nothing dropped between the pcap files, that I was doing it to myself with a firewall that wasn't even enabled, or that this is just how a network is supposed to work.
  • cedricgle 1 hour ago
    Does DigitalOcean still only propose up to 4 basic cpu as droplet maximum ?. All their compute capacities disappeared overnight 2025/2026 without any reason.
  • tolerance 24 minutes ago
    Back in my day a blog post like this would've included a promotional link for $100 in DigitalOcean credits!
  • assimpleaspossi 50 minutes ago
    RamNode does $2/month but just one ipv6 address. Add a ipv4 address and it's $4/month.
  • daneel_w 1 hour ago
    I run OpenBSD at netcup.de for €2/month. It's very low-spec, but it's enough.
  • slekker 2 hours ago
    For a little bit more you can rent on https://openbsd.amsterdam - they also donate to the OpenBSD foundation!
    • leonheld 1 hour ago
      Man I always look at this project with nothing by awe. I'd love to start something like this... if you're in central Switzerland and would like to copy their model, hit me up.
    • doublepg23 22 minutes ago
      +1 for obsd.ams , great VPS!
    • 8by3 1 hour ago
      They are cool, man they've grown. I used that when there were ~20 VM's on there. Its a great project but think its only physically in Amsterdam which is why I ended up moving back to vultr, as they have many more options.
  • Scarbutt 1 hour ago
    Crazy that after so many years of cloud compute a 8GB VM is $48/mo.
    • toast0 37 minutes ago
      If you can, it really makes sense to look for low cost dedicated servers. For $35/month I get a whole machine with dual L5520 and 24 GB of ram. I used to have a little nicer server for a little less, but that provider had to close because their costs for electricity and space went up too fast. Yes, the L5520 is ancient, but my server needs are tiny and it's fun to have a whole machine.

      Look on webhostingtalk or lowendbox or lowendtalk.