FreeBSD Hosting/Shared/VPS etc.

Of interest to some maybe... I switched to a t4g.small ARM based instance and 'top' and 'htop' and 'glances' are showing what I would now consider to be more accurate idle percentages.

An the instance is FREE until Dec 2025 under a AWS promotion.
 
Of interest to some maybe... I switched to a t4g.small ARM based instance and 'top' and 'htop' and 'glances' are showing what I would now consider to be more accurate idle percentages.

An the instance is FREE until Dec 2025 under a AWS promotion.
That's how they lured me, a 'FREE tier' RDS server. I'll still work with AWS if a customer uses it, but I'm never going to suggest it for any project or customer myself anymore :)
 
I just launched FreeBSD 14.2 on AWS with t2.micro and also tried t2.medium. Very easy to use the build that was on AWS marketplace.

But good old 'htop' shows the CPU(s) pegged at about 99% on the micro and 85% on the medium. 'top' shows 20 to 50% idle.
I get similar results to yours when spinning up a AWS t2.nano and t2.micro instance. Since I use Vultr as my daily driver I checked out a similar Vultr instance to t2.nano. It is hosted in Atlanta and only costs $2.50 a month for IPV6 only and is also single CPU. It was able to do the same tests with <1% CPU and >99% idle.

I wonder if the explanation is that some places are more oversubscribed than others.

I will agree that the great images provided by Colin Percival on AWS makes it really simple to spin up an instance. On Vultr I've created my own images based on the VM images from the FreeBSD download.
 
I get similar results to yours when spinning up a AWS t2.nano and t2.micro instance. Since I use Vultr as my daily driver I checked out a similar Vultr instance to t2.nano. It is hosted in Atlanta and only costs $2.50 a month for IPV6 only and is also single CPU. It was able to do the same tests with <1% CPU and >99% idle.

I wonder if the explanation is that some places are more oversubscribed than others.

I will agree that the great images provided by Colin Percival on AWS makes it really simple to spin up an instance. On Vultr I've created my own images based on the VM images from the FreeBSD download.

On my Proxmox 8 system on a bare metal PC is see similar issues where the linux guests even show i high idle that seems to be equal to the sum of the total proxmox box rather than just the individual guest.
 
I've only recently rented a VPS for the first time so I don't have a basis for comparison. I tried ARP Networks from the freebsd.org list of commercial isps and the experience was good in my opinion. I needed a hand finding the link to their virtual console which was indicated by an icon but with that I was able to boot into single user mode to correct the first and only time I locked myself out. With the virtual console it's not so snappy as having the real console at your fingertips but pretty much the same. It's only been up about a week but I have no complaints thus far.
 
I've only recently rented a VPS for the first time so I don't have a basis for comparison. I tried ARP Networks from the freebsd.org list of commercial isps and the experience was good in my opinion. I needed a hand finding the link to their virtual console which was indicated by an icon but with that I was able to boot into single user mode to correct the first and only time I locked myself out. With the virtual console it's not so snappy as having the real console at your fingertips but pretty much the same. It's only been up about a week but I have no complaints thus far.

I need to boot in single user mode so that I can repartition the disk that the zpool/root is on and am having issues with AWS. I should check out ARP Networks.
 
I added all of my favourite goodies to my t4g.small instance with 'pkg install'.

Basically, "sudo, bash, a new user with wheel privs, rsync, bind utils (for dig), git, python3.11, glances, swapfile, fusefs (for S3 mounts), linux_enable, timezone setup, .aws cli credentials, highly customized .bashrc, cloudflare dynamic dns update script for my domain".

Then I created an AMI based on my t4g.small instance. So that was is my base AMI.

Then I spun up a 16 cpu t4g instance based on that AMI and used git to pull the the /usr/src and /usr/ports.

Buildworld took roughly one hour to run and buildkernel took less than 30 minutes.

Then I created another AMI and launched another tg4,small instance from the new custom AMI.
freebsd-version -uk
15.0-CURRENT
14.2-RELEASE-p3

Is this the expected result? I runs and it is free for the rest of 2025 other than I that I had to make the disk bigger than the free 30GB.
 
Back
Top