Best low-end VPS Providers for deploying honey-sites to learn Bot Behaviour

eswar — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 11:05:38 +0000

I'm working on a personal project inspired by some security research (like the honeypot techniques) to set up 5-10 low-interaction honeysites. The goal is to attract and analyse bot traffic and classifying "good" bots (search engine crawlers) vs. "bad" ones (malicious scanners or exploit probers) without any real human traffic. I'll be running simple web apps like WordPress, Joomla, etc., via Docker on these sites, with Nginx/Apache for logging, and some fingerprinting tools (JA3 for TLS, Fingerprintjs2 for browsers).
I plan to run the same for few months initially. The setup involves deploying these on separate VMs to mimic isolated sites, and I need to keep costs low since this is for learning/experimentation. Based on my initial plan, each VM should handle:
Basic specs:
1. Something like 1-2 vCPUs, 2-4GB RAM, 10-20GB SSD (similar to AWS t3.small or medium, but I'm open to cheaper alternatives).
2. HTTP/HTTPS traffic (ports 80/443), plus SSH (22).
3. Preferably spread across different regions/datacenters for diversity (EU, US, Asia) to observe geo-varied bot behaviour.

Which low-end/free VPS providers would you recommend for this? Appreciate any advice, provider recommendations, or even config tips if you've dabbled in this. Thanks in advance

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Cloudcone — Tue, 29 Sep 2020 07:27:29 +0000

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