I just found this when looking for Canadian alternatives. Anyone else hear about gander? I’m doing my best to support home grown and open alternatives but I have to choose what I am doing on the platform. It’s unlikely that my older family will ever leave Facebook, but honestly, what do I miss by not being present there? Birthday posts on my wall and the latest vacation picture…
Hey, which Canadian host are you using? I’m in the market for one.
I am fairly confident it is hosthero.ca. I have the know how to use a VPS, I just do not want to manage a VPS (well I would like to have fun and try maybe sometime just not now). I just need to find ways to get away from US service providers.
On the topic of VPS I do not know if you want to count this or not but I use wireguard as a VPN into my home lab; which hosts my Jellyfin server, all my *arr apps, and my pihole. It does host a lot of space across my three pi’s with MVNe drives I have tried hosting my own Nextcloud but made a booboo and broke it so I went out and got a sync.com subscription for my cloud storage.
Across all the services hosted by Apple, Wordpress, and whatever else I was paying for just cannot think of them now I am paying considerably less for my stuff.
Thanks very much for the informative reply, I’ll look into all those.
I paid good money a few years ago to get my info stripped from data brokers; as I live in Saskatchewan they could/would only do the bare minimum, which was still a lot do not get me wrong so I got next to no spam. I run a pihole on my LAN so I have some tracker protection as well to block trackers from getting my email. I was using Apple’s hide my feature so all the new things I would sign up for would have their own unique emails.
When I was pricing out the plans I realized it was less expensive to get whatever their least expensive web hosting was and their plan with unlimited emails. I am moving my password manger out of Apple’s walled garden into 1Password, I knew I was not going to easily export passwords from Apple’s password manager into another so I started doing that manually. I knew I was going to have to jump through the hoops to change emails for some things (totally forgetting I had 70 odd icloud addresses), when I was reading somewhere that my ISP (Sasktel) was no longer giving out email addresses and had moved to an exchange server. I do not want my emails getting anywhere near Microsoft’s grubby little fingers, even if it is through a protocol they lease out to providers or companies so I started separating my emails even going to, what I called my professional email address, I am currently sitting at 110 separate email addresses and still have not made it through all of my addresses yet.
How do I manage all those email addresses? Well you see 6 of those emails are “main addresses” which everything gets forwarded to depending on what they are, in case an address gets spammy I can more easily find the stuff and it will help me keep all my things sorted. Every so often I try to say I will keep my mailbox clean, that lasts for a little bit but then it falls apart i am hoping that keeping everything in their own address and then forwarding to a “main address,” will help me stay on top of that more.
Not the person you asked, but I’ve had some luck with ovh. The web interface is a little jank, but it’s super cheap for tiny a vps. Once you get ssh access it’s like every other cloud provider. Not sure how their offerings for managed services is, since I run everything on vps (very small scale).
Next up I’d really like to try self-hosting, and cut out the cloud entirely.
Is OVH $4.67/mo? (source)
I’d be interested in a Canadian version of something like this, for $15 USD/yr: https://tinykvm.com/
I’ve been using it for a few years now and it’s great for a few hobby web dev projects. I feel like ~$5/mo is a lot for something I just play with now and then and host a simple static site on, but ~$1/mo feels fine.
And +1 to the other person who responded about how self hosting email is too much work, I’ve heard that it’s extremely difficult not to end up getting blocked, presumably because spammers significantly outnumber legitimate self hosters, and most people use one of the big email providers anyway. (I don’t like this, I feel like email is very important and we deserve the right to self host it, but I don’t know what can be done about it)
Yeah that looks about right. I went with their smallest Intel VPS because they had a big 12 month discount on those, so my $/mo is actually less than a toonie right now lol (sadly I don’t think the discount is available anymore). Still it’s a good deal, and as far as “the cloud” goes, I can see myself sticking with these guys for my humble needs.
I use them as a drop-in replacement for a Digitalocean (no complaints, but it’s American, so), and while the UX is certainly a lot rougher with OVH I’ve been happy with them as far as cloud providers can go.
Thanks for the info. I typically self host everything, but I don’t run an email server; too much work.