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.
 
lostinthesupermarket said:
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.
Click to expand...
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 :)
 
lostinthesupermarket said:
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.
Click to expand...
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.
 
bgrant said:
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.
Click to expand...

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.
 
roper said:
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.
Click to expand...

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
Click to expand...

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.
 
covacat said:
netcup seems to have arm64 vps now.

ARM Servers – Efficient Performance & Ampere CPUs | netcup

Discover the ARM servers from netcup. With Altra Max processors, we offer energy efficiency and performance. Ideal for Linux applications.
www.netcup.com www.netcup.com
no idea of what performance they have compared to x86 but i might try it
i already have an x86 vps from them

LE. they are all sold out lol
Click to expand...
I already thought about ordering one during their black friday offers, but they were also sold out back then...
 
i wonder how useful they are to build arm64 ports. otherwise they don't have any advantage over x86
i am pretty sure they are slower than my mac mini but don't know by how much
 
covacat said:
i wonder how useful they are to build arm64 ports. otherwise they don't have any advantage over x86
i am pretty sure they are slower than my mac mini but don't know by how much
Click to expand...

My actual chain of thought back then was:
"This would be nice to try out..."
"I'd need another one to build packages"

If they were available at hourly rates (like e.g. droplets at digitalocean) I might give it a go some time, as you can just spin up a really beefy node for a few hours to build packages and get away with a few bucks per month. But I neither have any arm64 hardware at home that could also benefit from this, nor do I really have that much additional spare time available at the moment... I'm still waiting for something like the first ampere generation to drop in price enough to make them interesting as a homelab server for me, but given they are pretty rare this might only happen when they are really old and of no good use any more other than just nostalgia (I also still have a sun T1000 in my rack though...)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top