What VPS to choose?

4 min readApr 20, 2022

There are tons of cloud providers that offer different types of servers with a lot of different options. I will talk about the ones I tried/tested and compare them here so people can choose which one suits them better.

AWS ec2 Instances

AWS ec2 instances provide a lot of different options but I will recommend the free tier options. If you create a new account, for 12 months you will have 750 free hours in the following instances types: t2.micro and t3.micro

The rest of the instance’s types offer much more cpu/ram than 1CPU and 1GB ram, but I do not recommend them because nobody on earth understand how the billing system works for ec2, it is not an exact number and the bill may vary from month to month due to on-demand usage. So I only recommended the free tier to have a “free” VPS to play with. → https://aws.amazon.com/

7/10 recommended (only for free tier and basic VPS).

Linode

Linode has a special place in my heart because it was the first VPS I bought a few years ago and I still have a few of them. Linode is pentester/bugbounty friendly cloud provider, I got like 2 tickets in 3 years asking me about traffic going outfrom my vps to bugbountysites, but after explaining what I was doing, they left a note and I didn’t have any more problems with them. Fair prices, reaaally good performance and it’s really rare to see their services going “down” or a “force shutdown” for maintenance.

Fast to set-up, and fast to delete the VPS if you don’t need it anymore.

Referral for $100 discount in the first 60 days after you create your account.

DigitalOcean

DigitalOceon offers the same VPSs as Linode at the same price. I used it a lot when testing axiom, the problem I faced here is that when support made me a ticket to ask me for what the account was for, and why did I need so many VPSs, they blocked my access and shutdown the “Droplets” or VPSs (whatever you want to name it) for the duration the ticket was for.

Although that isn’t a really big problem, it was not a very good experience for me so that’s why I prefer Linode, both offer the same VPSs at the same prices, so good customer service made me stay with Linode.

8.50/10 recommended. → www.digitalocean.com

Scaleway dedibox

Ok here is when things start to get interesting. Scaleway dedibox offers great VPS and a really good price: https://www.scaleway.com/en/dedibox/pricing/?ram--min=4&ram--max=1024&price--min=11&price--max=1368

Although the prices are in euros and not in dollars, the prices are less than Linode/DigitalOceon. The VPSs have a good performance with good specs.

The downside is you can’t select a lot of locations and it is pretty restricted (there isn’t and option for US). I have a 8GB ram & 8CPU cores for 21 euros a month there, if you are looking for performance (more cpus/ram), this might be a really good option.

note: 8GB in Digitaloceon/Linode would be $40 a month.

8.5/10 recommended. → https://www.scaleway.com/

Contabo

Contabo is by far the cheapest one of all of the ones I seen. The difference here is:

you pay a set-up fee when you create/buy the VPS, its “one-time”
you pay the full month, you can’t buy it, and delete in the middle of the month (well you can but you will still pay the full month).

If you are looking for long-term VPS, that you know you will use for a long time, and you are looking for good CPU/RAM ratio, then contabo might be for you.

It was a lot of different options for configurations and good regions to select.

Downsides I had: tickets would take 2–3 days to respond, trouble paying for the VPS, etc… gave me a few problems.

5/10 recommended if you are not sure about it

9/10 recommended if you are going to use it for +6 months or a long period of time and looking for a “cheap” VPS → https://contabo.com/