You might also want to see their Storage Share[3] service - similarly priced but more user-friendly with a NextCloud frontend and WebDAV HTTP interface.
From another discussion here, I found that Backblaze B2 and Cloudflare R2 are still cheaper. May want to check them out too.
[1]: https://www.hetzner.com/cloud
Less than €4/mo for 1TB of storage is an incredible price. It would be $100 per month at Linode, they don't even offer snapshots and last I tried the IOPS limit was abysmal. DO is probably the same thing.
Hetzner too has block storage volumes but they cost more than storage boxes. I think block storage typically costs more because it supports higher IOPS.
They do make it really easy to upgrade, so if you write a decent UserData script (or build your images with packer and deploy them with pulumi/terraform) you'll be able to easily go from zero to functional no matter the size, and you can scale up as needed.
I've personally used the following in the past. It was quite cheap and generally happy with it.
https://www.time4vps.com/storage-vps/
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You might also want to get (snipe) a server off https://www.kimsufi.com/uk/servers.xml — the best ones usually sold out within a minute or two, but nothing beats the price.
That said, with their Storage VPS offerings the OSes that they offer may or may not be suitable for your needs: https://www.time4vps.com/knowledgebase/what-os-do-you-offer/...
Personally I'd suggest that you do not publicly expose such an OS but rather have it act as a NFS mount for another VPS with a newer OS release.
Also, while they offer backups (with restoring them being a manual and paid process), no such option is available for the Storage VPS offering, you can see that much being stated in the FAQ at the bottom of the page.
Once again, I rather enjoy their services and they're a relatively local company so I'm glad to support them, but at the same time Hetzner is pretty much on par with what they offer, with time based billing (instead of per month) and a nice UI: https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box (though I had to verify my ID when I signed up with them, which was inconvenient and actually had my attempt be denied a few years ago until recently when it worked, not sure what that was about)
Furthermore, you might also look at the offerings by Contabo, though their performance isn't exactly excellent and there are setup fees and their UI looks antiquated (but the service itself is okay): https://contabo.com/en/storage-vps/
I think most options out there will have certain drawbacks, since for whatever reason the status quo is to have smaller packages so whatever backing resources the servers have can probably be split up nicely amongst the customers' instances, thus making storage optimized VPSes something of a niche product.
Approx. price per the recommended setups (no public facing EOL distros) for 1TB of data, per month (divided when yearly billing applicable):
Time4VPS (storage VPS + container VPS), new client, monthly: 3.99 EUR + 1.99 EUR = 5.98 EUR
Time4VPS (storage VPS + container VPS), new client, yearly: 3.33 EUR + 1.66 EUR = 4.99 EUR
Time4VPS (storage VPS + container VPS), regular prices, monthly: 7.99 EUR + 3.99 EUR = 11.98 EUR
Time4VPS (storage VPS + container VPS), regular prices, yearly: 6.66 EUR + 3.33 EUR = 9.99 EUR
Hetzner (storage space + VPS): 3.45 EUR + 4.15 EUR = 7.6 EUR
Contabo (300 GB + 700 GB storage VPS): 3.99 EUR + 7.99 EUR = 11.98 EUR
Contabo (1400 GB storage VPS): 12.99 EUR
Hetzner (block storage + VPS): 48.74 EUR + 4.15 EUR = 52.89 EUR
DigitalOcean (block storage + VPS): 96.26 EUR + 4.81 EUR = 101.07 EUR
Vultr (block storage + VPS): 96.26 EUR + 5.78 EUR = 102.04 EUR
Scaleway (block storage + Stardust VPS): 58.40 EUR + 1.82 EUR = 60.22 EUR
By using Scaleway you would pay ~12€/m for 1TB of storage and ~7€/m for the smallest instance (can go even cheaper if you manage to get a stardust instance at ~1.5€/m). Also, Scaleway does not charge for egress (bandwidth) so it seems the perfect solution to your problem :)
Alternatively, you could enable the website feature[0] on the bucket to save you from setting up a web server, but then you would pay for the egress.
[0]: https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/storage/object/how-to/use-b...
Disclaimer: I'm just an happy customer
Internet -> instance -> S3 = free egress
Internet -> S3 = $$ egress
I think Hetzner's great (it's definitely the right choice in here), but it is missing some features we've come to expect from low cost but robust cloud providers (DO, Linode, etc) -- Managed S3 storage, simple Database as a service, etc. I'm working on a sort of... proto-cloud that can sit on providers like Hetzner, OVH and LeaseWeb and offer this functionality.
My thing is called NimbusWS (https://nimbusws.com), but there are other things:
- Elestio: https://elest.io/
- Symbiosis: https://symbiosis.host (they offer managed k8s, they run on Hetzner IIRC)
Early on I won’t be supporting running custom code — so it will basically only be backing services!
If you wouldn’t mind emailing me I can give you access to the documentation early —- we will obviously live and die by documentation so probably best to stay there
I think the free tier will give you a free forever 1GB e2-micro, so you might be able to get that then only pay for the $40 GB disk and outbound bandwidth.
B2 backblaze is an S3 compatible API that will hold 1TB for $60/year before bandwidth charges.
The bandwidth charges might kill these 2 ideas for you, but cloudflare or bunnycdn might be worth looking into to hide gcloud or B2 behind.
It's a tiny dedicated server that should be plenty sufficient. I run all my personal infra on these (and the higher spec ones) and they're great for the price.
Intel ATOM N2800 2c/4t 1.86GHz 4GB DDR3 1066MHz 1TB 100 Mbps
Never seen this anywhere
The "storage VPS" just means they're focusing on storage over CPU or RAM ...they're still full VPS instances
CPU 1x 4 cores 3.30GHz SYS-5037MC-H12TRF 2 SFF bays ram 16GB DDR3 hdd 1x1TB SATA traffic 10 TB Availability 1 hr - 5 days US$43.64 per month - ( https://www.leaseweb.com/bare-metal-server/configure/27128?c... )
yeah that's not apples to apples - it's not an SSD drive - those are more for that size, but it sounds like you are looking for price and likely do not need to spend the extra dough for SSD.
Emails will be in French mind, which doesn’t really bother me.
Performance is fine, happily/needlessly serving my static website and navidrome using microk8s on one of the slightly beefier boxes.
I've used their VPSs many years ago, and they were excellent in terms of performance and support. Nick, the owner, has sold the company since then, and I haven't used them lately, so I'm not sure about their current standing, but worth giving them a try.
The other option can be to store the text files as objects on Backblaze B2 or Cloudflare R2 for cheap.
Either put the static files in the bucket or use Cloudflare Pages.
Will be around $5/mo and you get ddos protection, edge caching, etc, etc.
If you want to experiment Cloudflare is free and the first 10GB on B2 are free.
Get some Intel NUC and 1T disk. Install everything and use CloudFlare Tunnel to expose server via CF to the internet.