TierHive | Hourly VPS | FREE to try | From $0.10 p/month | make your own plan | NOW in KANSAS USA !!

backtogeek · February 9

General project update at the end

TierHive - Cheapest Hourly VPS Starting at $0.000135/hr ($0.10 per month)| FREE TO TRY | 1GB ram 10GB disk - $0.80 p/m | 512MB ram 5GB disk - $0.40 p/m

New ish, slow HDD Storage available in the UK as a second disk on your VPS up to 4000GB now

New, VPS resources and Reverse proxy in Kansas USA, if popular, we will look to add storage and sql offloading here too

Pricing: Starts at just $0.000135/hr - for 128MB Ram and 1GB Disk, pay for what you use, and goes up in 128mb or 1Gb increments

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^Check out the pricing calculator on our website!

** The Basics **

This is just a regular NAT VPS platform with a lot of added optional extras to make it more functional as a service.
You get 2 TCP/UDP ports per VPS
You can manage your own /24 from 10.0.0.0/8 so you might get 10.5.251.0/24 (10.5.251.2 - 10.5.251.254)
Your servers, no matter where they are, can talk on your private LAN without port limits, so you can have multiple entry points, consider the external IP's like edge routers.
You get to manage your own DHCP scope if you want for your /24, including pxe/ipxe/dns etc
We are privacy-focused to the extent we can be, we don't need your personal details, we use an MOR model for payments so we don't need your data, we don't collect it, just an email address and username/password. Accounts that are not active are set to purge after 90 days, we dont store your IP info beyond that.
You cannot run up debt; the billing is hourly, if you dont have enough on account to cover the current hour, we just take the partial payment as full for that hour like if that hour should cost 0.02 and you only have 0.01 we just take the 0.01 for that hour and that triggers your 6 hour warning to top up, we just leave your servers live for free during those 6 hours and eat that, after 6 hours we do suspend, then you have a few days to top up before services are removed, after they are removed, you can still top up and start over, no debt, no problem.
limited to 2GB Ram for now per VPS, but we plan to raise that to 4GB this month and finally 8GB, which will probably always be the maximum.

What you get:

NAT VPS in DE, UK, and CA (UK being restocked soon)
Your own /24 - spin up to 253 VPS instances
Private network segment that works across ALL locations
Self-migrate and self-install - you're in control
All Linux/BSD templates available
Optional DHCP with full options.
ipxe/pxe boot available, run your own network installs.
netboot.xyz compatible
1 click deployments of laravel, WireGuard, OpenVPN, Wordpress, Docker, GRAVcms, LAMP, LibreNMS, Nextcloud, Vaultwarden, Beszel, Docker and more coming soon.
A recipe system e.g. deploy 6 VM's in xyz locations, run script1.sh on the first 3 and script2.sh on the next 3, sql offload, automatically pass database info to scripts, and auto configure haproxy for VPS 2 using domain example.xyz
Optional network attached storage.
Optional scheduled or 1 time backups.

What we handle for free:

SSL termination
Reverse proxy
Email
Database offloading
Build recipes (automate your deployments or deploy community recipes)

Earn free credit by promoting us with backlinks or posts on X

Want to kick the tyres first? It's free to try.
Ever wanted to learn how to network boot or deploy/install an OS? this is like a homelab in the cloud!
Perfect for homelabbers, developers or just tinkering and learning, its for anyone who needs cheap test environments, or anyone who wants flexibility without the price tag.

What it is NOT
- Pretending to be an enterprise solution
- Trying to win benchmark competitions
- As fast as most VPS hosts
- Where you use for your precious data without backups.

General project update

Not as many this time, I have not been well again and was forced to slow down again.

But key things:

Kansas City is live thanks to @Advin and whenever he has capacity elsewhere, we will spread to his all his locations, so if you like the service in Kansas, and want to fully unlock it, Advin Servers is the natural next step and pushing your TierHive disk image into one of their VPS will work fine (via rescue).
DHCP Price has been drastically lowered, honestly, I don't know why it was so high, it is now 0.000005 to activate (generates the full config for your subnet and gets offloaded to us to run in all locations) and then is 0.000001 per hour to remain active. to be honest, only a handful of people use it, and it makes me say, I thought it was a killer feature maybe I need to make a video, maybe I am just a nerd.
Reddit referrals were a disaster, far to much manual work, that won't come back until I figure out a better way, but please join us on Reddit anyway, if you contribute, you will probably get some sneaky tokens. https://www.reddit.com/r/TierHive/ even if you dont want too participate it really helps if you join.
Pleased to see some of the SEO/LLMO is paying off, getting quite a lot of referrals via LLM now and on the 1st and 2nd page of Google for a few phrases now, not huge traffic but increasing week by week.
We lowered the entry point to $3 for February (You can still get free tokens on sign up).
We solved a big scaling bug that was SERIOUSLY slowing things down for people network-wise, so we literally made that 10x faster while reducing latency (classic case of you don't know what you don't know until you do)
It's becoming apparent to me based on comments and tickets that people don't really get it still, beyond a NAT VPS and that's fair enough, so for the rest of this month, my main focus is going to be on simplifying the message/info, making some tutorials, videos and diagrams etc.
We know London is crawling, sorry, we need more compute there, we will get to it asap.
It's not impossible you will also see France or Poland or both towards the end of the month, but its not a priority.
We are looking at adding a static hosting option, considering if things go to plan, we will have edge SSL termination in 50 locations eventually with CDN and meshed routing for faster TTFP entry points for your local traffic base its just a no brainer, probably a free tier and a pad tier the only difference will be CDN priority group and space, its actually not that hard to add.
I am feeling the IPv6 pressure, I am not leading on that, I would just like to say, I get it, but it wont be rushed, we want you to be able to allocate your own /64's make sure they work over the mesh from any location, and allow you to home a /64 to what ever location you want, not just a basic short term fix that then becomes hard to untie. also to add to that, in over a dacade of offering IPv6 and actually seeing what people actually use, its just a fact that 90% of people take it because its free and available, probably 1% of them actually use it, so its important, because its a NAT service, but its not a priority.
We fixed a mail relay bug that was allowing you to send without dkim validation... naughty spammers!
We fixed a suspension on payment bug i.e. if you ran out of credit on free tokens and THEN topped up after you were already suspended it did not auto unsuspend.

Happy to answer questions in the comments. or if you want a very informal chit-chat and support, join us on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TierHive/ you might even get free prizes if you do!

IAmNix · February 9

@backtogeek said: We are looking at adding a static hosting option, considering if things go to plan, we will have edge SSL termination in 50 locations eventually with CDN and meshed routing for faster TTFP entry points for your local traffic base its just a no brainer, probably a free tier and a pad tier the only difference will be CDN priority group and space, its actually not that hard to add.

Wow, that's just amazing. Like you say an obvious feature (to someone who knows what they're doing...) - but still a gamechanger in usability and featureset. Getting up there, punching two orders of magnitude above your pricepoint.

@backtogeek said: I am feeling the IPv6 pressure, I am not leading on that, I would just like to say, I get it, but it wont be rushed, we want you to be able to allocate your own /64's make sure they work over the mesh from any location, and allow you to home a /64 to what ever location you want, not just a basic short term fix that then becomes hard to untie. also to add to that, in over a dacade of offering IPv6 and actually seeing what people actually use, its just a fact that 90% of people take it because its free and available, probably 1% of them actually use it, so its important, because its a NAT service, but its not a priority.

Awesome - if you had full public IPv6 with all public ports I wouldn't have had to buy a Hetzner box to play with a service that needed full internet access. Playing with public-facing services for 0.1/month - just amazing. Thanks

lgsin · February 9

It's good to see new locations coming live.

By the way, can the VPS name / label be modified after creation?

backtogeek · February 9

@lgsin said:
It's good to see new locations coming live.

By the way, can the VPS name / label be modified after creation?

Yeah, you know what, I will commit to sorting that this month, it's trivial, and it should have been done; it just got lost in the weeds.

yoursunny · February 9

@backtogeek said:
Accounts that are not active are set to purge after 90 days, we dont store your IP info beyond that.

Does login count as active?
Or must we spend our precious free credits on an hour of IPv6-less service?

backtogeek · February 9

@yoursunny said:

@backtogeek said:
Accounts that are not active are set to purge after 90 days, we dont store your IP info beyond that.

Does login count as active?
Or must we spend our precious free credits on an hour of IPv6-less service?

login is active

backtogeek · February 9

@lgsin said: By the way, can the VPS name / label be modified after creation?

Was a quick win, the label can now be edited.

backtogeek · February 9

Haproxy ssl bug sorted, it was not adding domains to the SSL section of the haproxy config if the certificate was marked for renewal in the backend.. sorry about that!

Nybble · February 10

@backtogeek said: We solved a big scaling bug that was SERIOUSLY slowing things down for people network-wise, so we literally made that 10x faster while reducing latency (classic case of you don't know what you don't know until you do)

I stopped using my Canadian plan because of what I thought was "general network weirdness" (connections in/out were slow) due to oversubscription. Time to check again!

backtogeek · February 10

@Nybble said:

@backtogeek said: We solved a big scaling bug that was SERIOUSLY slowing things down for people network-wise, so we literally made that 10x faster while reducing latency (classic case of you don't know what you don't know until you do)

I stopped using my Canadian plan because of what I thought was "general network weirdness" (connections in/out were slow) due to oversubscription. Time to check again!

Literally no one reported it, haha, it was horrendous, should be much better now.

backtogeek · February 11

@IAmNix said: Wow, that's just amazing. Like you say an obvious feature (to someone who knows what they're doing...) - but still a gamechanger in usability and featureset. Getting up there, punching two orders of magnitude above your pricepoint.

Little sneak preview of what we are working on in relation to this, when it launches, you will have options next to each IP and URI/URL to create your domain-level blocklist and WAF filter from, this will be available for VPS before we add the static hosting element, you will also see yoru CDN hit rate and purge options, this is a beta in alpha dev branch (wow I know haha.)

teamacc · February 12

@backtogeek said:

@IAmNix said: Wow, that's just amazing. Like you say an obvious feature (to someone who knows what they're doing...) - but still a gamechanger in usability and featureset. Getting up there, punching two orders of magnitude above your pricepoint.

Little sneak preview of what we are working on in relation to this, when it launches, you will have options next to each IP and URI/URL to create your domain-level blocklist and WAF filter from, this will be available for VPS before we add the static hosting element, you will also see yoru CDN hit rate and purge options, this is a beta in alpha dev branch (wow I know haha.)

I get that this is possible to do since you're on NAT, but when you roll out ipv6 this might be less possible, since the VPS itself will terminate the ssl connection instead of haproxy doing this for you. I'm not even sure if people want you to be able to log this from the provider perspective.

backtogeek · February 12

@teamacc said:

@backtogeek said:

@IAmNix said: Wow, that's just amazing. Like you say an obvious feature (to someone who knows what they're doing...) - but still a gamechanger in usability and featureset. Getting up there, punching two orders of magnitude above your pricepoint.

Little sneak preview of what we are working on in relation to this, when it launches, you will have options next to each IP and URI/URL to create your domain-level blocklist and WAF filter from, this will be available for VPS before we add the static hosting element, you will also see yoru CDN hit rate and purge options, this is a beta in alpha dev branch (wow I know haha.)

I get that this is possible to do since you're on NAT, but when you roll out ipv6 this might be less possible, since the VPS itself will terminate the ssl connection instead of haproxy doing this for you. I'm not even sure if people want you to be able to log this from the provider perspective.

HAProxy supports IPv6 too

In TierHive HAProxy does not just blind forward like it used too in the old LES project, and in other NAT services.

It does SSL termination
It does WSS forwarding
it does weighted load balancing
it does fail over
it does CDN
it does sticky routing
it does edge termination for faster TTFP as you can use any of our HAProxy edge servers to reach your backend over the mesh.
this is adding WAF and IP ACL management at the edge before it hits your server.

It will also offer all of that on IPv6 too, and the static hosting option we have planned will also use all of the above but obviously in a more shared hosting style interface within the TierHive control panel.

I appreciate right now it may not seem so grand as we only have 4 locations but the plan is to be in every viable location, aiming for 50.

I am pleased you're questioning it though because my biggest hurdle is explaining why it's a bit different to just a NAT VPS... I need marketing help haha, volunteers?

backtogeek · February 12

This morning we enabled bigger plans.

You can now have up to 4GB Ram and 50GB disk. Anything >2048MB gets 2 vCPU instead of 1

New UK node also coming online hopefully later today or tomorrow, so UK will be open again and have much higher performance than the existing node.

risturiz · February 12

Hi, any chance to have additional database options in the future?, like:

Database migration
Database load balance
Database web cli

Thanks!

backtogeek · February 12

@risturiz said:
Hi, any chance to have additional database options in the future?, like:

Database migration

Database load balance

Database web cli

Thanks!

Actually a lot of the work has been done so you can do master<>master or slave and migration, but we decided to launch without finishing that, its on the road map, to be honest its very underwhelming how many people use the sql offloading service, still early days, but i think we will probably finish the code to achieve what you are talking about and maybe add some web cli options, as the hard work is already done.

I don't know when exactly, but it's a good idea, if its still very underutilised, to be honest, we may actually remove the sql offload as an option, it's a lot of maintenance, adds some big security overheads to the code base, and if less than 2% use it, why bother?

Not ready to throw the towel in yet, but its a sore point, a HUGE amount of time was spent on it for most of it never to be in the first public release.

We will see

backtogeek · February 12

UK compute and storage resources are now available again

TierHive | Hourly VPS | FREE to try | From $0.10 p/month | make your own plan | NOW in KANSAS USA !!

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