Topic: Sharing for Bitcoin Core download: the cheapest pay-per-hour VPS I found. (Read 346 times)

I used pruning.

The data limits were added after I wrote that post. It says you'll pay "$1 per extra 1TB", which is like $0.50 for the full blockchain.

Hi @Loyce got here because of the Run A Bitcoin Node [CHALLENGE] and looking for some guidance here...

Am looking at the specs of VPS used on your test, wasn't the data downloaded by bitcoin core more than allocated DISK space on your virtual machine??

And knowing there is over 500gb of the blockchain to be downloaded as of today, do I ignore specs from VPS being listed and go for it or do I need to match up the data required for a full sync to complete..?

Hope this isn't marked for necro posting

Tiny update: they've added more different Linux distributions to choose from, and all (3) locations are available again. On Lowendtalk.com someone said they should rename to "SoonVDS" because of the many promises to add more locations "soon". Lol. It's still a very good price though, and they're still running

Currently:
At least this gives me the impression they're not overselling their servers, but it also looks like they don't have enough capacity to run at the low price they're offering.

I did another experiment, this time I took the most expensive VPS (160 GB NVMe, 4 CPU cores, 16 GB RAM, 200 Mbps bandwidth and Ubuntu 22.10). I installed Bitcoin Core, and let it sync (settings: 6 GB dbcache and 80 GB prune). This took less than 22 hours to complete and cost me just under $0.50 in total:

I got a new VPS (the cheapest one with just 1 GB RAM) and copied the pruned node data onto it. It continued syncing from 2023-01-18T18:04:37Z (just 9 days ago). It has 500 MB disk space remaining.
This gets you 3% more available disk space by reducing the reserved space from 5% to 2%:

It took about 2 hours to catch up on the last 9 days of transactions, which is 100 times faster than real-time. That also means just 1% of the CPU power is enough to keep it up to date, which means it shouldn't trigger the 95% CPU steal again.

To conclude my topic: a $1/month VPS with 1 GB RAM and 10 GB disk can indeed be used to run a pruned node, although it's better to do the initial block download on a more powerful system. Once synced, you can use a cheap VPS with 1 GB RAM for normal Bitcoin Core tasks through bitcoin-cli.

I've now used the 2 GB VPS for 4 days. Bitcoin Core is at 2018-03-27 (35.5% complete).
The VPS got very slow, CPU steal is at 95%.

So this:
It's true the CPU throttling indeed only started after a few days, but it dropped to 5%, instead of 25%.
That makes sense, the CPU has 4 cores, and giving 25% to a user who pays $2 per month won't pay the bills. But they should be honest about it.
At this rate, it's going to take a long time to complete. I'll experiment a bit more after I copy a finished "pruned node" to a new VPS.

In that case, I can recommend RackNerd from personal experience Don't get the prices from their website, get the specials on Lowendtalk. Black Friday deals are still available.

I've used them for 1.5 years, and only once got this email:
I sent them an email (I was copying large files at that moment), and 12 minutes later they restored full speed.
Uptime so far: always
Note: I haven't dared sync a pruned Bitcoin Core node on that server.

I can't say, I used Tor a VPN. They have no idea where I am.

I've seen many hosting providers that don't like Tor-registrations. I wouldn't call it discrimination, they're probably trying to avoid abuse. I even saw one that asks for a selfie with ID, so I just avoid those.
For VPN, I like Mullvad.net. Since it's also pay-per-hour, it nicely fits this topic. Pay them as little as you want and you'll get the minutes you paid for.

When trying to increase my balance at HostVDS, Plisio now shows:
I'll chat with them
Update: their answer is useless:
Update: It works without Tor (using a VPN). So I guess I didn't use Tor the first time I paid either.

I can think of some uses. I often don't want to install/compile something on my own system when I'm only testing it shortly, and I'd gladly pay $0.01 for a VPS for a few hours. I already did it today. The alternative would be a VM (and often VPN).

Hence my post

It's a cloud service, I don't expect one of them to sell out until they're all gone at once.

They don't. They use plisio.net for crypto payments. It accepts BTC/LTC/XMR and more, I usually use a low-fee altcoin to avoid Bitcoin dust.

It's prepaid, just pay what you need. I don't think credit expires, but there's no need to send a large amount.

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I got tired of waiting, so I copied the pruned directory to my dedicated server. They both continued from 2016-08-31, and even before the VPS finished that day, the big server finished the entire next month. All in all I reached 19% for less than $0.07. It could still finish, but takes longer than I hoped for this little experiment.

The first plan isn't worth it, it's just for the eye. And honestly, it's freaking good for $1 per month. The second plan though is very interesting. Double ram, double storage, and 4x Internet speed? Okay, that's soon to be sold out. Hey, Loyce, have you checked if they accept LN-BTC, and if you pay once per month or annually?

New company, low prices. We better get on board early.

That makes more sense than my interpretation My expectation is that if they'll ever reach "good company"-status, they'll raise their prizes too. I'll probably use them for scraping in the future, when I need a new IP address for a couple of months and downtime is not a problem.

Update on my 2 GB RAM VPS: it downloaded 43 GB in 15 hours. At the moment, the CPU is idle, RAM is not full, but the download speed dropped significantly and it barely syncs new blocks. Downloading a Linux ISO (always a good test) gets me 30 kB/s, and if I start another one, both drop to 15 kB/s. Maybe they're throttling the server after downloading a lot. That wouldn't even be a problem, but it should be documented. Now I can only guess.

Progress: 15%.

This question was for other users who would read the post and may have the experience with HostVDS, sorry for being very general in my post, should have made it clear.

Btw thank you for sharing real experience

Did you even read the OP? They've had many problems, I've encountered some problems, and it looks like they're still trying to expand. But it's the only place I've seen where you can play with many different servers after sending them a dollar.

If you want a reliable pay-per-hour VPS, go to RamNode. They'll charge about 5 times more for the similar specs, and from what I've seen, they're reliable.

Is HostVDS a good company? Do they have good and reliable support? Didn't find much about them via quick search.
I'll use the opportunity and post here instead of a new thread. Idk if you speak or understand Russian but I guess anyone can use Chrome's built-in translator and translate this website from Russian to English.

https://webhost1.ru/vps-vds-israel <- Vps located in Israel with exactly the same system costs 2.4 USD a month. I was using this hosting many many years ago instead of Hetzner because during the winter they had unbeatable deals and good support too. Idk if their tos allows to use it for bitcoin core but if anyone is interested, they can try. Just posting for low price purpose

Yes. The OS takes only 2 GB.

I noticed something else: kswapd0 is eating CPU:
So 1 GB RAM is a bit low I knew that, just never tried.
So far, it downloaded 22 GB, so it's slowing down significantly. One solution would be to create a VPS with more RAM for the IBD (Initial Block Download). Doubling RAM to 2 GB also gives a higher bandwidth, and at 4 GB RAM it adds another vCPU too (for only $0.00536/hour).

For now, I'll let it run. It still downloaded another 0.3 GB while typing this.
Update: I've started another VPS, this time in Silicon Valley. This one has 2 GB RAM, 20 GB disk (only 10 needed), faster internet and the same CPU. Let's see how they compare, I expect much better performance. I'm now paying a total of $0.004 per hour
Update: I killed that second VPS. It was actually slower. It had a low system load, so maybe it's internet isn't as fast as expected.
Update: I started a new VPS (also in Dallas), with 2 GB RAM. I copied the incomplete and pruned Bitcoin Core data to that one, and continued syncing on both. By the time the first one (with 1 GB RAM) had downloaded 0.6 GB, the other had downloaded 3.6 GB. That's 6 times faster for double the RAM (and hourly rate). The second one doesn't have kswapd0 eating CPU, so I'll kill the first one now.
Update: The CPU-load got quite low, so I restarted bitcoind with --dbcache=1536 to see if that speeds things up.

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After setting up the VPS, it sends the root password by email, but it doesn't work. From the Dashboard I can manually change the root password, and then it works.

I found HostVDS on Lowendtalk.com and thought I'd share it because I've seen people in need of cheap servers.
Note: I'm not endorsing the service and from the reviews I know they've had quite a lot of downtime. It also was impossible to register with a Protonmail email address, and after I registered with my Gmail, I couldn't create a New Instance until a day later (customer support said there was a problem and they fixed it). So it's definitely not recommended for any production environment, and I wouldn't trust them with any sensitive data nor send them anything more than a dollar. Also, it looks like they charge 20% more on crypto payments.
It's not even a real Virtual Dedicated Server, it's just a VPS:

Now the good part, and the reason why I posted this: the value for money is amazing! $0.99/month gets you 1 vCPU Core, 1 GB RAM, 10 GB NVMe storage and 50 Mbps bandwidth. Usually, you'd only get these specs at this price when you buy an annual subscription on Black Friday and pay for the year. Now, you pay $0.001333 per hour for this, and can turn it off (wipe it) when you're done!

So I deposited $1 with a low-fee altcoin.

To test, I've setup Ubuntu 18.04 in Dallas. It's been 56 minutes since I created the VPS Instance, and after some testing I started syncing the latest version of Bitcoin Core (pruned). It has downloaded 6.4 GB already, while CPU steal mostly around 1-2%.

After another 8 minutes, it downloaded 7.6 GB. That's 9 GB per hour, and if it keeps going like this, it will be synced in 2.5 days. I'll update this thread on my progress. At a cost of $0.032 per day (about the same price range as the energy consumption of a Raspberry Pi), I'm impressed

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