Fedimeteo: a €4 Freebsd Vps Became a Global Weather Service
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A tiny €4 FreeBSD VPS has surprisingly evolved into a robust global weather service, FediMeteo, leaving many to marvel at its creator's ingenuity. As commenters dug deeper, they uncovered the secret behind the VPS's impressive specs: a clever deal from a German provider, netcup, with others chiming in on affordable alternatives like LowEndBox and ByteHosting. The discussion sparked a lively exchange on affordable hosting options, with some discovering hidden gems and others sharing resources like LowEndTalk, a forum for bargain hunters. The thread's appeal lies in its demonstration of what's possible on a shoestring budget, inspiring others to push the boundaries of what can be achieved with minimal resources.
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Where on earth did he find €4 VPS with these specs. For example Hetzner's cheapest VPS has 2 shared vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 40 GB NVME SSD.
The cheapest I found is https://contabo.com/en/vps/ but it still doesn't have 1 gb/s connection with that price.
Edit: typo
Here are actually the 4 EUR and below offers: https://www.netcup.com/de/server/guenstige-vserver-angebote
Funnily I on first sight could not find the same page in english.
Found this as an example: https://lowendbox.com/blog/black-friday-bytehosting-is-here-...
Lowendbox is amazing. Glad we are talking about it as I recently joined it and the community's really supportive and honestly feels more so in the sharing spirit and I even talked about why people use lowendhosts etc. and got some pretty good answers imo
Although do be beware to stay away as there are some hosters which end up going completely down. So go with someone reputable as well and there is whole lore beneath in this forum :)
Racknerd,dedirock are usually recommended, I recommend https://serverdeals.cc/ etc. I have a list which I can recommend after being in the community for some time and here's some websites which I recommend for suggestions
https://serverdeals.cc/
https://vpspricetracker.com/
https://getdeploying.com/
Honestly I still recommend hetzner tho because these are some really really good deals but hetzner just has this reputation of more stability and I jsut have more faith in hetzner and its a "good enough" option imo and there are even some lowendhosts who kind of do share the fact that hetzner is very price competitive.
I personally had gotten a 2$/month 1TB vps hosting (yeah didn't really end up using it much aside from the shock factor/running yabs on it)
and also I got a 3 month 8bucks deal with netcup using their vouchers and everything to get 8 gigs of ram 4vcpus etc and honestly this was the best deal I ever saw but I will have to pay 5 bucks I guess after the 3 months end.
Most of it is remaining idle tho :< Are there any services I can run for the benefit of humanity (like running some self hosted services that can help anybody out there or smth?)
Let me know if you have any questions! I might be able to help you as I was active on lowendtalk till quite recently
I think racknerd recently did a 6.85$ or similar deal but the point of these deals become is that they become insanely overprovisioned and it becomes a showpiece of sorts "look what deal I got ;P" kinda not sure.
I think another fascinating deal about lowendtalk is that man those people have this faith in small hosting providers and giving chances to them etc. hoping that they become big as well. There are very few places like lowendtalk on the internet. I find a lot of similarities with the hackernews culture although more focused on deals/hosting although its definitely more casual than hackernews.
I used to get boxes from there for a specific product I had (ability to ping from multiple places around the globe to see what your latency was like) and one provider did burn me but the rest were pretty great.
I just wish more of them provided a proper native IPv6 stack. Still can’t understand why this isn’t standard for all.
Oh boy I had thought about this too. There are only quite a few uses of the completely cheap one. Perhaps for the chinese people, it acts as a VPN
Like I thought about the use cases and they were hard for me to find when you consider all the "free" stuff that's launched too. I think to me, some aspects of lowend are for the novelty factor (oh a 2$ 1TB server sign me up!) and what ends up happening is that I didn't really use the storage much so my opinion was nice whereas someone else who used it said that, it's a bad deal
You are right about this though, but still its just fascinating to find the deals and then like the fact is, they are still pretty small and you can just go talk to them and I think this customization and more discussion (hey does your product allow my usecase) etc. are some few reason
I once asked on the forum why they aren't using hetzner,upcloud etc. and someone replied with the fact that they want to make the small one win.
I don't think its completely gambling but you may end up buying something that you don't need much (I ended up with a netcup 8 gig server I guess) in a similar way. But now I kind of know that beating hetzner,ovh, (upcloud's more expensive) is possible perhaps but that if you want ton of servers fast and cheap, there is a possibility but I might still recommend companies like hetzner,ovh,upcloud etc. for any professional use, its just I would be thrown less under the bus as compared to if I have somebody idk set up in dedirock
One of the reasons why I stopped frequenting lowendtalk, might go next black friday perhaps but I don't even know, like there are tons of services now which can offer vm's cheap and fast and just similar to what you might buy from that. There are tons of these I use so I don't really know if buying cheap servers might make sense
One of the reasons I (liked?) the idea of buying cheap servers is that one can always scale when needed and they could then use something like these lowendproviders instead of vercel who initially might be free but then is super expensive. But I think that we are seeing some options which are free but not gonna be super expensive or that expensive perhaps.
The thing is, to me, its nice knowing a place like lowendtalk exists. I might go into its rabbit hole again or not I guess but I don't really know.
And it's pretty much a commodity business, so things are going to tend to look similar. If you're buying $5/month VPS, you don't want to pay for a lot of fluff. A lot of these are small time local hosters in a single location, but that's usually all you need for a small site.
There are alternatives but usually all just go use these for some reason
This is also why a lot of these websites might look similar as well.
Now another aspect is that the hosting economy is very mutual, they all start out somewhere and they are usually friendly towards each other. Most Hosting providers start out by either using reseller service directly or by colocating or by reselling dedicated servers which can be themselves of other providers
I don't know but the community is both cut throat and chill at the same time. It's strange to point this phenomenon but I think my point of their friendliness is something which depends and I don't know much about it but I once asked people on lowendtalk if I wanted to create a cloud provider myself and I got some responses and they were friendly so I am basing it off of that
Another aspect is that the market has already raced to the bottom super hard. Hetzner/OVH are really cheap, so to get even cheaper, you kinda have to be in the same pricing range I guess
Fun or not so fun fact but do you know that there have been cases of lowendbox providers to actually go shut down because they take these completely no profitable sense deal and actually lose money sometimes. VeloxMedia is a recent example of that and there is still controversy surrounding it.
There is also the fact that the scam industry in this department works as such:
Rent a really big server with lots of cores for a few months
Sell them unreasonably in LET for the year pricing or more
Then sell the company/be unable to provide/etc.
these I think are called as deadpools in the community.
Also regarding your comment behind same guy, there are sometimes family relations between people
as an example, racknerd I think is owned by the stepson of the owner of colocrossing and they I think using colocrossing themselves.
These have their own little drama stories and I think this is just the tip of iceberg as I just joined recently and probably digging through old archives.
> 1 GB RAM 2 vCore 50 GB RAID-10 SSD 1 TB @ 1Gbps 1 Free IP $17.99 /month
that's far from any sort of cheap, may be there is something very special with them?
https://www.racknerd.com/BlackFriday/
No affiliation, just a happy customer.
Some were fine, some offered a very good yearly plan but vanished after three weeks.
So yeah… people should keep that in mind.
Gullos Hosting which has 128 Mb server for 3.5$/yearly and also for $4.49 you can still get a 256mb server from C-servers and $5.50 from byteVirt.
But also, there is fact that one can probably just buy hetzner servers or upcloud servers or similar idk. I will probably try to get some free services and then transition to hetzner/upcloud/netcup when my project needs more scalability/is shown to be of valuable to the general public/interests regarding it.
Honestly I got a 8 gig netcup server for 5$ and so I got it out of their limited deals section but I am thinking of just holding it and probably gonna use it extremely because with the rising prices etc., I think its good enough too as well
I just love yapping about server prices and comparing them etc. I think I just love a good deal lol.
I can't recommend Gullo's. I experienced near-constant network issues with my NAT VPS (in Poland, I think?), making it so unusable that I just let it idle until it expired. I should've spent the money on a 6 pack of beer instead, it is what it is.
He didn't - he found a better specced one in Italy for that price
5-6 years ago, I remember trying to scale up to the 16/32GB tier was miserable and oversubscribed; moving to Hetzner at the same price point brought a huge performance boost (mostly on CPU and disk access speed).
Not bad as long as you know what you’re getting yourself into.
If your sign-up tier is so frustrating to use that you loss sales and you cannot fix it as a company, that doesn't inspire confidence in the rest of the infrastructure...
Once I got account I could not spin up server until converting my account to paid. They’ve never charged a fee but they won’t let you use ‘always free’ instances in busy regions until you convert to a paid account.
If you have a RAM-constrained application where CPU and RAM speed are less of a priority, they can be great deals though.
Maybe I'm imaging it but FreeBSD really seems to have far less bloat than Linux distros and better latency. I just setup a $4/mo FreeBSD VM on Vultr with 1G RAM and 1vCPU and it's only using 12% of RAM with Caddy. A VM with 4GB of RAM and 4 vCPUs could serve a lot of traffic.
I'm wanting to create a personal blogging with a retro BBS-like web app with a text first interface with a multi-threaded Nim server + sqlite. I'm sure something exists already but it'd more for my own tinkering. No containers, no async, no javascript libraries. Just a small 4MB binary and FreeBSD. This posts encourages me on the FreeBSD route!
Although VoidLinux's iso size I think is larger than ArchLinux or something which doesn't make that much sense but I don't really know but both are good references to check out.
Man I love alpine even though I don't use it so much but alpine does hold a special place in my heart for some reason (and i think the reasons are good)
Tinycore is another one which holds a special place in my heart, partially because its the most no BS simple alpine-like os that I have seen which is rather focused on the consumer side, so you can get GUI systems super quickly and minimalist.
The minimalist tinycore iso with gui and terminals ran on 21-40 MB :) let that sink in
They showed as 0.0% or 0.1% on my 8 gig computer.
I used tinycore to take my really old laptop which my brother used to game on mostly and was super dead, it was a dell mini pc with intel atom 1 gig of ram 32 bit, probably 10-15 years old
I ran tinycore on it with no problem and ended up with wifi access and then even ran modern firefox browser and ended up even running a website like https://pomodorokitty.com/ on it
Man,do i love them both.
I genuinely just wanted to create a service which could just boot tinycore gui servers in the browser perhaps via novnc for people to play with but I seriously wondered who might pay for the project
Oh btw oops forget that you can already do that by just downloading the iso of tinycore and then going to copy.sh/v86
In fact that inspired me to create the project but one of the issues of copy.sh/v86 is that its ephemeral and runs directly in your browser so if you close it whereas I thought of having a mini-server-like tinycore where I can get a gui mini server and can quickly open/close it with terminal and even heck modern browsers.
Everyone should try out tinycore just once imo. The simplicity of 21 MB is mind boggling to me. Makes one really wonder what bloat really is I suppose, definitely a fun experience.
Oh also I love alpine because I ran it in my phone using UserLand and I loved it although running python in alpine was a bit of mess on my phone and I think I ended up doing some wizard magic or something using g-compat in the end as well to run it. Although I think termux is pretty good and even better than UserLand in this context because UserLand runs emulated where Termux doesn't I guess but not sure.
Like is there a way to get postmarketos with something like jwm or anything small perhaps? I would love to give alpine desktop a try, I think I did the disservice of not trying it enough then if you mention this
Don’t know whether it is the case anymore, but it’s something I proved in the past and then engineering deployed minimal Debian instead because it ended up being cheaper.
IIRC last time I tried a bare-bones FreeBSD installation it used about the same amount of memory, maybe a little more based on how ZFS is set up.
[1]: https://github.com/systemd/mkosi
That's probably not the only reason but it bothers me that I never considered that before! I remember at some point it used twice as much RAM for basically the same thing, and I remember being bothered by that.
But I guess what you get in exchange for that is the ability to put in basically unlimited RAM.
Both are more or less impossible now, but I don't think we should think of 100mb of "background state" as bloated. The fact that your can get a lot of useful stuff done on Linux in under 512mb in 2026 while Windows and Mac need multiple GB just to get out of bed is pretty awesome.
You mean like oldschool dialup BBSes, or a forum-style "Bulletin Board"? If the latter, take a look at FlaskBB :-)
I do prefer the GNU style licensing model & popularity but for the code itself, I prefer the BSD ones.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28479595
Its not 4 , but 16 'cores' 2 packages = dual cpus on the same motherboard.
Seeing a global service run on a 512MB FreeBSD VPS using Jails is a masterclass in software craftsmanship. It’s a stark reminder that our modern "cloud-native" stack often masks inefficiency with complexity. It makes me rethink the infrastructure I build—do we really need a massive cluster for every service, or do we just need to understand our operating system better?
The choice of FreeBSD here isn't just "niche"; it’s a pragmatic engineering decision that prioritizes stability and resource predictability. Truly inspiring work.
I use podman, but I haven't ever tried ZFS on Linux, instead just relying on an LVM of the drives. I will remedy at least that last error soon since I want to set up a personal archiver and you can't realistically do timelines without the deduplication that ZFS gives.
Same! I've been trying to reduce complexities in my stack (e.g. Docker) and while systemd exists, I think the concept of "jails" or sandboxes is quite neat. I love tools that come with better out-of-the-box readiness.
[0]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd/Sandboxing
https://jgbrwn.neocities.org/weather/
Only one region, but could quite easily expand. It takes the open-meteo ocean data and combines it with some short and long range weather. Then run a preprocessed refined version of that through an LLM to turn it from quantitative into qualitative. It basically does what I would do in my head.
If you have any ideas, please let me know
https://surfrash.xyz/
Reuqest for manly, nsw, australia
Is there a high res weather model for Aus? That makes a huge difference as well
I got a similar specced server for around 5$ I guess but it has 400 gigs of storage or 500 and I think all around it might be worth it.
But to be fair it was a deal for 3 months for 8$ with vouchers and everything and Its only been a month but after the 3 months, I would have to pay 5$/5Euros but I think it might be worth it, not sure but there is definitely this power of not leaving once you have started to own a vps or similar, that pull is definitely real :)
OVH is good company too, one of the cheapest overall in the markets. Some people themselves resell OVH servers or white-sell it, they are chill in this manner
I think one of the benefits of OVH is its unlimited egress policy. Upcloud and OVH are the only two which offer something similar I suppose and I think OVH is on the more cheaper side but Upcloud support team did feel phenomenal to me (I wish I was sponsored by them)
Pro tip but I have heard from people to talk to OVH through their twitter. I don't use twitter but yeah, also another idea for support could be to join their discord too, I think one of the core people once answered my simple question there (how to run docker in ovh servers/automate it) but they didn't answer some other question regarding the tos of ovh or similar which I can admit could be not sure if we should ask a developer about such things idk but overall all of these are pretty good options to pick!
There is just something fun about optimizing about server prices and support and just this grid-like optimization that takes place in your head when you are interested in things like this.