That pricing is awful. $4/month for 512MB VPS...eeek.

You'll find much better pricing at RackNerd, DediRock, InterServer, BuyVM, etc. Small indy hosting companies are the way to go. 2GB for $5/month or so is the typical price point.

Any host that offers KVM and allows you to upload your own ISO can run OpenBSD (or FreeBSD, NetBSD, whatever you want).

Check out LowEndTalk or LowEndBox for deals. There are other sites but that's where I shop.

Sure, if you need an API, or if you want to host in one of the less common locations, or if you absolutely must have five nines, then DO or Vultr or Linode or Amazon LightSail can be a good fit. But if you just need a VPS with a control panel in a typical hosting location (Amsterdam, LA, New York, Chicago, Singapore, etc.) then I don't see the point of paying more at one of the big hosts.

Always happy to see more people having fun with OpenBSD. Running my own set of OpenBSD boxes (although the public-facing ones are on Hetzner), so I read through the instructions and it aligns with my own experience (although I usually emphasise that most correct choices in the installer are just the default).

However, this part: "Since this is going to be a bare-bones web server we can remove most of the sets.". This is not great advice. Reducing the number of sets even on a headless server can lead to issues with ports depending on libraries Xenocara provides that would then be missing (fonts, etc.). Likewise, when you upgrade the default is to install all sets unless you manually intervene, which could lead to a surprise bump in disk usage that you may not have accounted for. In general, reducing the number of sets should be considered "I am deviating from the defaults and I know what I am doing" territory and Theo keeps threatening to remove the option to select the sets in the installer when people complain and I am inclined to agree with him. So, if you have 10GB of disk in that Droplet, just do the OpenBSD thing and go with the defaults and you will be all the happier for it down the line. Messing with the installation size really is for those rare cases (fitting many VMs on a single host, ancient machines, etc.) where you have no other choice.

A warning about openbsdhandbook[.]com - this website has completely incorrect information for some things. Like hallucinated, even though I think it was created before LLMs.

I've always gone with Vultr (vultr.com) for BSD VMs, its properly supported by them and while I've never hard verified this, they seem like a nice smaller player. Like they have offered Open/Free BSD VM's for > 10 years, kind of nice.

DO burned me recently due to their unwillingness to handle DDOS attacks: "The best we can do is change your IP." Thanks guys.

Switched to OVH immediately.

You can even go completely free with Cloudflare tunnel with your own office/home hardware. I have a simple web running on my old Raspberry Pi 3 + nginx + golang web app. Also with ssh access to the Pi.

I've been running OpenBSD on DO for years. I have a very details guide about setting up iked just in case you are interested: https://ngxv.org/blog/entry/2021/01/14/openbsd-vpn

P/S: The website is running on a Raspberry Pi 3 in my house, hope HN won't hug it to dead

I've had a 1GiB VPS for a while. I'm starting to think that I could have done with 512MB for the fairly simple jobs I have on it. As long as I get 1 whole CPU slice (no slowdowns) I'd be ok. The 10GB SSD would be tight, but a scheduled upload of logs/data to an S3 like service using rclone would be possible.

Back in my day a blog post like this would've included a promotional link for $100 in DigitalOcean credits!

Does DigitalOcean still only propose up to 4 basic cpu as droplet maximum ?. All their compute capacities disappeared overnight 2025/2026 without any reason.

For a little bit more you can rent on https://openbsd.amsterdam - they also donate to the OpenBSD foundation!

I run OpenBSD at netcup.de for €2/month. It's very low-spec, but it's enough.

On Linode you can run any Linux for $5/month with 1gb of RAM and 25gb of storage

Crazy that after so many years of cloud compute a 8GB VM is $48/mo.

RamNode does $2/month but just one ipv6 address. Add a ipv4 address and it's $4/month.

A reminder that Oracle cloud has a free tier that gives you 2 vps

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