Published: Nov 13, 2025 by Isaac Johnson
OVHcloud
I can easily signup from the login page
NOTE: I did this without any referall so I just have to pay for stuff.. here is some other persons referall code - not even sure whom - but at least you get $10 or $20 in credits.. sadly i didn’t do this
I just need to give some basic details
We can pick our account type. I’ll use “Private individual”
They have new portal in beta which I’ll use. I need to create a project
I’ll give it a name
It then sent me to a billing page to pay US$0. A little confusing as to why…
Ah, they charge me a $1 just so we can get a payment method setup.
I then saw the order was processed
Now when I go back to the Project picker, I can pick my “freshbrewedtest” project
Databases
They have PostgreSQL, ySQL , MongoDB and Valkey available (I don’t consider memorystores databases, but we can save that argument for another time)
The cheapest is US$55.50 a month
My challenge here is I’m trying to not be in the US on this one and the only choices I have are Virginia and Oregon
Instances
Soon, however, in just trying to find more items I got into an error loop in Firefox
I switched to Chrome and was unblocked, but again, as a US customer they just give me US otpions which I did not want.
The same was true of Kubernetes clusters
CRs
They had a basic “S”(small) container registry for US$23.14 a month which would not be too bad
Hetzner
We can Signup for Hetzner at https://accounts.hetzner.com/signUp
I then need to go through a signup flow
They don’t even let you get through the signup flow without a payment setup
I found it amusing they have an option to not save your card, but you cannot complete the form unless you agree to it
But then I can complete and enable MFA
Like IBM, they wanted “enhanced” verification of my identity.
But unlike IBM, they didn’t try to coax me into emailing full copies of my ID papers and instead has an app with a QR code that scanned my ID and then my face. I feel like I have done something like that before for some online certification exams.
Once I got through, we can get to a Console landing page where we can create servers, firewalls, LBs and the like
Reviewing the server create page, it would seem that it’s pretty cheap for a basic VM, but I also think I’m signing up to pay for it all up front for a month
Let’s create a VM together and test it
I went to check usage which suggests I just spent 1c
I saw Limits thinking it could be budget related, but instead are soft limits. I’m okay with most, but the 5 server limit is rather low IMHO for something I’m paying for.
Going back to our server, we can see a history of activities, location and some specifics on usage like vCPU, RAM and disk
In “Graphs” we see some live metrics
Backups, as they suggest, enable automatic backups for 7 slots. They then add 20% to the cost of the server
Snapshots are point in time snaps of the disks for which you can create new servers (like a disk image capture)
Networking and Load Balancers let us assign an LB and Network to this host. I find this a pretty easy to grasp way to front traffic to some legacy services.
The firewall setup is a deny all except style
We can add multiple volumes (disk) to the host, each up to 10Tb
“Rescue” is a pretty cool option. Say you have a system in segfault or crashing at startup, you can mount the volume on another host to help sort the issues out. This would have come in real handy during the 2024 crowdstrike issue
They let you mount some canned ISO images to the server. Not sure why this would be all that useful
Rescale lets you change machine class and Rebuild looks like it lets you respin the host with a canned app
Object storage
It would seem I would spend about $6 month for buckets which has a lot of storage included
To access it, we could use an S3 compatible tools. To generate S3 credentials (access key and secret), we can do that in the Security/S3 credentials page
DNS Zone
I looked and looked, but all evidence seems to suggest that DNS management, at lest for now, is completely free
