The Digital Ocean FreeBSD workaround for anything other than an existing droplet is to use custom images. I wouldn't have a problem with that except they don't support IPV6 for custom images which is a non-starter for me. I don't know what magic they have that they are unwilling to provide or document so custom images could have IPV6 support.
So no fresh installs of FreeBSD on Digital Ocean anymore if one needs IPV6.
I've spent the last 2 months trying out Linode, ArpNetwork and resurrecting my EC2 instance to see which one will work for me. Except for lack of extra cycles I'd have tried out Vultr already also. [Edit: now have tried Vultr] You can skip the following unless you are interested in my experience.
My testing has been primarily to verify FreeBSD installs, IPV6 support, and Network speed. Price, while a factor, is not my major deciding point.
Digital Ocean still has the best bandwidth to my Southern California ISP from their San Francisco Bay area CoLo but no FreeBSD support going forward (with IPV6).
Vultr has consistently good bandwidth from their LA CoLo. Just about everything is perfect with Vultr except for a bug that causes a hang booting FreeBSD on a 1vCPU system when loading virtio_random.ko. One has to work around by setting a hint at the loader prompt on boot or blacklist in a config file that kernel module. I've filed a bug at: PR 265549
Linode has the next best bandwidth, pretty easy to install, a couple of IPV6 autoconfig glitches that have been solved through a decent support system for FreeBSD by Linode. One odditity, they have images you can save for install/reuse but they have to be ext2 not raw. Thus I can't save a FreeBSD installation image for reuse building new VPS instances and have to download it via the a recovery boot each time before installing. It is possible to load raw VM images from the pre-installed images on the FreeBSD site. Also I found wide variability in performance between hosts my VM was on.
ArpNetwork has good FreeBSD support but I'm working through some inconsistent bandwidth issues for which I have an open ticket. Their provisioning system is a little clunky compared to the others.
Amazon EC2 took forever for me to get the EC2 parameters right to allow IPV6 autoconfig (rtadv/dhcp). As a benefit though there are great FreeBSD provided images to provision all the latest versions.
One of my tests was downloading a 1G file from each server to my home (abbreviations are the obvious two letter provider):
[EDIT: Added Vultr.com VPS data and updated Arp network bandwidth]
Code:
me@mynode ~$ scp root@do:bigfile .
bigfile 100% 1024MB 47.1MB/s 00:21
me@mynode ~$ scp root@vu:bigfile .
bigfile 100% 1024MB 47.8MB/s 00:21
me@mynode ~$ scp root@ec2:bigfile .
bigfile 100% 1024MB 32.3MB/s 00:31
me@mynode ~$ scp root@ln:bigfile .
bigfile 100% 1024MB 31.0MB/s 00:33
me@mynode ~$ scp root@an:bigfile .
bigfile 100% 1024MB 9.3MB/s 01:50Anyway for anyone who has read this far, I hope the above is of some use.
Bob
P.S. 11/18/22
I settled on Vultr after both Arp Networks and Linode had inconsistent bandwidth to my ISP. Linode was a close second and both Vultr and Linode allow you to upload golden images which I created using the FreeBSD Virtual Machine raw image as a base. By customizing the VM image with my SSH keys and some other initial info I can spin up a VM on either Vultr or Linode with a couple of clicks and be ready to go without installation steps or funky workarounds. Linode doesn’t provide ISOs and Vultr has a strange bug that I workaround with a loader hint.
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