The Core

Saw someone mention this host on another forum. This looks too good to be true.  http://www.cloudatcost.com/pricing.php
One time payment and you own the server space for life? There's gotta be a catch. Hosted in Canada.

Anyone heard of this?

They have a huge sale on now. Looks too good to be true.

I'm in.

This shows your CloudPRO resources you purchased as well as your usage. You can add as many servers as you want until you consume all your resources. If you don't have enough resources you can purchase more resources by clicking "Buy Resources".

It rn mostly OK but definitely slow (their boxes will be oversold)... I wouldn't put anything production ready on them.

Might be a good place for an rsync backup of your main server. You just have to hope they don't go out of business on the same day that your main server dies. But it would be cheap backup

I grabbed the Pro 1 and Pro 3 accounts. The end result is an aggregate of whatever you purchase, so I have 5 CPUs 2.5GB RAM and 50GB disk space. You can install as many OS as you want as long as you have CPUs and space to spare. You get a virtual space that's controlled thru a VMware console. They have a number of OS to choose from from Windows server, Ubuntu, CentOS, FreeBSD, to Debian.

I got a Debian box running, but it took quite a while to get it up to date. I was thinking of running a VPN and maybe a few other apps there. I don't know that I'd put an active website there.

Looks like the parent company is Fibernetics in Canada. This company is using the unused resources there. Don't know much about them, but it's said they have 60000 servers and 50000 customers.

Having never set up a server, this is a little raw for me.

I assume they start you off with an OS at least?

I am also no sysadmin. Personally, I enjoy riding with training wheels. I used CPanel for a long time, but now I'm a Webmin/Virtualmin user and find it awesome. It gives you a bit more low-level access than CPanel and does not really change anything on your server. As I was saying in the other thread, it's more of a GUI layer for the command line than it is a replacement (like CPanel).

Also, Digital Ocean has a great library of How Tos for setting up almost everything you can imagine on a server. Whoever does their SEO/content strategy is pretty good - you search on something like "Set up Rails on Ubuntu 14.04" and they're likely to show up. But then you do "Set up Rails on Ubuntu 16.04" and they're there too. In general, I find their guides quite good.

Be wary of their servers shutting down on you after 7 days. They say they do this to prevent poorly, unattended, pwned servers from running forever.

Modify > Change Run Mode > Normal

> WebMin

That was straightforward. Very handy. Beats fiddling around with CLI command lookups I would otherwise do.