So I selfhost a number of servers in various locations and utilize a DigitalOcean VPS as a hub/gateway to transmit data between these nodes.
I have a consistent issue when running large backups or transfers in which DigitalOcean flags my server for a DDOS attack and sends traffic to a black hole for 3-4 hours.
Customer support has been the absolute worst and does fuck all to help remedy the situation in any way. These events have been consistent over the past 8 months.
Does anybody have recommendations for a solid VPS provider?
Price isn’t too much of a factor. I was running a $8/month server but I don’t mind something more expensive if the company has a good reputation for reliability and privacy.
As mentioned, I primarily use a VPS as a gateway/hub for file transfer services. I’m also hoping to spin up another VPS for static websites.
Try Hetzner "cloud" offer (shared vCPU). They price it by CPU, RAM and storage, the transfer is 20 TB for all plans. You can choose to be hosted in Germany, Finland or the US (typically, sometimes a specific plan is temporarily sold out in a certain region).
I don't think you'll find any guarantees about that since it will vary wildly depending on their bandwidth use at any given time, your ISP's, and everything in between. I don't think they cap it on purpose if that's what you mean, but they do have an upper capacity limit, naturally. Generally speaking you should get some pretty decent speeds, like the other comment mentioned.
Try using ICE instead of proxying all your traffic through a VPS. If you're just using the VPS for session establishment you won't be using a lot of bandwidth and won't get blocked or go over quota. Try searching for things like "wireguard mesh stun".
If you're feeling adventurous, lowendtalk is quite a deep rabbit hole.
Personally, I use rsync.net for backup stuff. Way better for backup than standard vps because everything you put there is automatically snapshotted every day (you can configure how long you want to keep the snapshot). No full shell access, but you can still use rclone there.
That's really unfortunate. I love Digital Ocean and spend about $800/month with them for work.
Can you tell me more about the traffic they are mistakenly flagging as a DDOS? I ask because I have regular DB and file backups happening and if we had traffic shutdown on production assets for 3-4 hours, it would be a big fucking deal.
So each time I get shut down is during a large extended data transfer. I have my VPS server set up as a VPN hub that connects multiple servers. So typically when my traffic gets diverted to a black hole by DO, there was a consistent roughly 35MB/s inbound/outbound vpn traffic stream for 4-5 hours going through the VPS. My server gets shut down for 3-4 hours and I get a email notice that my server was under a massive DDoS attack and they diverted traffic to a black hole. I always respond informing them that it’s not a DDoS and explain the situation. They typically respond with “Utilize a service like Cloudfare which has DdoS protection”.
I’ve been really happy with them as a provider otherwise but this is a dealbreaker for me.
Hmm, that really doesn't sound like a traffic pattern that would be confused with a DDoS attack. I would be frustrated as hell too.
What's concerning is that our traffic would look very similar. We have a VPN dedicated droplet that allows access to our DO private network where the rest of our resources can be accessed. We also have high throughput periods though not as sustained as yours.
For backups, consider using rsync.net. for a server, have you looked at dedicated servers before? OVH has some cheap servers every once in a while that should be better in theory than most VPS.
Thanks. I actually selfhost my backup server. So I'm not backing up to a VPS. I use the VPS as a hub in a hub and wheel configuration to connect multiple servers (including a dedicated backup server).
I have used Vultr and I'm quite happy with them, however I had not moved backup level data into the servers so can't attest that they'll work great for you.
I would try Vultr, if DO is being weird. They are awesome and have very similar pricing to DO.
Hetzner is ok as well, but they have annoying DDoS filtering.
You could also try AWS ARM EC2, but they're expensive for bandwidth by comparison.
I’ve never heard anyone else mention them, but I’ve had really good luck with https://www.ssdnodes.com for the past several years. I don’t recall ever using their support, but I did have a policy question before buying when I first signed up and they were pretty quick to reply. I think I found them on LowEndBox.
I'm not 100% sure, but wasn't ssdnodes one of the companies that offers really cheap deals without actually giving you the specs they say?
E.g. they say 64gb ram, but you actually get a VM with memory ballooning enabled and then your account gets suspended if you consistently use that much ram
I can’t speak to the moral side, but it’s worth noting that from a privacy perspective the major cloud providers basically don’t want to be able to interact with your data.
I work as a cloud engineer and regularly engage with support from Google and Amazon and in general they can only see stuff like metadata and resource configuration, as well as the raw hardware health for your resources. For anything further generally you’re going to have to explicitly provide information, share your screen, etc.
Just wanted to clear up that tidbit. Again, doesn’t help with any moral objections you may have though.