Yes, the cloudflare SSH tunneling works well -- though I think the fact that SSL is provisioned means it'll show up in the cert transparency log, possibly attracting unwanted attention to probe my home systems.

I ended up turning that off and switching to Tailscale. Tailscale is set to advertise my home IP range (I chose one that's not 192.168 based which avoids problems with range conflicts). So I can just connect to Tailscale and connect to 10.X.Y.Z as though I'm home. If I want memorable hostnames I can point DNS records to those private IPs.

You still have to pay for electricity. If you consider that "completely free" then paying $4 per month should also be considered "completely free".

They were very helpful when one of the AMD firmware patches in 7.3 caused my VPS to not boot. They even offered to apply a manual fix until patch -015 was available which fixed it.

I used buyvm.net for BSD a while back. Didn't have any issues, and the few times I contacted their support they were quick to respond and helpful.

rootbsd.net before that, but they don't seem to exist anymore.

The admins have access to your data and unless things have changed, that isn't monitored. They also bend to NSLs like any other provider. What they charge vs what things cost hurts.

I tried to warn them that they were hosting a phishing site once and they weren't very receptive.

Otherwise, I hosted a site with them for years and all went well.

They're also too stupid to understand that they've been dropping UDP datagrams with src port == dst port and < 1024. This obviously breaks IPsec IKE. I showed them dummy traffic captured with netcat and tcpdump, but they refused to admit they caused the problem. They repeatedly claimed to see nothing dropped between the pcap files, that I was doing it to myself with a firewall that wasn't even enabled, or that this is just how a network is supposed to work.

I heard all the RAM scheduled to be manufactured next year had already been sold out. Maybe that's a related phenomenon?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49207236

e.g. Hetzner tripled prices recently.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48542064

Man I always look at this project with nothing by awe. I'd love to start something like this... if you're in central Switzerland and would like to copy their model, hit me up.

+1 for obsd.ams , great VPS!

They are cool, man they've grown. I used that when there were ~20 VM's on there. Its a great project but think its only physically in Amsterdam which is why I ended up moving back to vultr, as they have many more options.

If you can, it really makes sense to look for low cost dedicated servers. For $35/month I get a whole machine with dual L5520 and 24 GB of ram. I used to have a little nicer server for a little less, but that provider had to close because their costs for electricity and space went up too fast. Yes, the L5520 is ancient, but my server needs are tiny and it's fun to have a whole machine.

Look on webhostingtalk or lowendbox or lowendtalk.