Run OpenBSD on DigitalOcean for $4/month

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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