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…
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.