Announcing: SporeStack EU

I'm excited to announce that SporeStack has a new provider, mysteriously named, "SporeStack EU!"

Now, this won't change your life or get rid of your greys. But if you like to use SporeStack, it's a much cheaper option.

It has the same pricing as Slow Servers, but has a larger OS selection (though no OpenBSD, yet), no VNC or serial access, /128 (instead of /64) IPv6 networking, and IPv4 is optional for an extra $1.50/month.

It's also much faster than Slow Servers!

While it isn't hosted on used hardware, as far as I know, the company I'm working with doesn't seem to have any grand AI ambitions. A small company, not a megacorporation focused on endless growth. The lower pricing, though, is a huge bonus.

Available in Stockholm, Sweden, and Amsterdam, Netherlands.

(Neither is DMCA ignored, don't get your hopes up!)

Pricing comparison

I wanted to provide a brief pricing comparison with the traditional SporeStack offerings of Vultr and DigitalOcean.

The "standard" Vultr offering is a vc2-1c-1gb for $9.60/30 days (not yet available with true monthly billing.)

The "standard" DigitalOcean offering is a vps-1vcpu-1gb for $11.40/30 days (also not yet available with true monthly billing.)

Comparable SporeStack EU is $7.50/month for the same specifications (1vCPU, 1GB memory, 25GB disk, IPv4+IPv6), so $2.10-3.90 cheaper than both of those.

Now DigitalOcean does offer a great cheaper flavor, vps-1vcpu-512mb-10gb for $7.50/30 days. It has wide region availability, but limited OS support due to the small disk. For many tasks, 512MB of memory is fine, but some will want more. So compared to that flavor, it's the same. Keep in mind that you can't even run Ubuntu on it, you'll have to use Debian. (Now I see no issue with that, but some prefer Ubuntu and it may be a dealbreaker.)

Speaking of cheaper flavors, you can drop down to a 768MB flavor with SporeStack EU. This has 18GB of disk and supports the same images as the 1GB flavor. It's $6/month, so if you can deal with a slightly smaller server, it's even $1.50 cheaper than DigitalOcean's cheapest offering, with 50% more memory and 80% more disk.

And if it isn't a problem for you, you can drop the IPv4 address and be $1.50/month cheaper than those prices. Thus you can end up paying as little as $4.50/month for a pretty decent server.

Of course Vultr and DigitalOcean have excellent track records and plenty of regions to choose from. I don't think SporeStack EU will replace Vultr or DigitalOcean for everyone, but for some I think it will be a better option.

Larger servers

Now the pricing gap really widens if we start looking at larger servers.

Let's say we want to run a full Monero node (no pruning,) so we need at least 300GB disk.

SporeStack EU has a 4vCPU, 16GB memory, 400GB disk server for $97.50/month (and yes, that includes IPv4.)

The next server with at least 300GB of disk, outside of Slow Servers, is Vultr's vc2-6c-16gb with 320GB of disk for $154.20/30 days. Now it does have two more vCPUs, but you certainly have to pay a lot more to get them!

Compared to the SporeStack EU 16GB memory flavor, it costs a hair more than the 8GB Vultr/DigitalOcean options.

While this is still no where near Crunchbits' ultra low pricing, it's definitely closer to market rate.