I was a happy Hetzner customer for years. Then they announced a 30% price hike, and I was shoved out the door.
After a week of spelunking through benchmarks and Reddit threads, I surfaced with Hostup — a Swedish provider I'd never heard of.
Their VPSBenchmarks score: 83, with A grades for disk I/O and network performance. For $4.55/month, they offer 2 vCPU, 4GB RAM, 50GB NVMe SSD on EPYC processors, and 7 free backups. A comparable plan on DigitalOcean costs $24.
I'm now paying roughly 20% of what I would have paid for similar specs.
I assumed smaller providers were shaky. They don't have the name recognition of Hetzner or DigitalOcean, so you have to dig to find them. Most developers default to the big names because who wants to spend an afternoon researching server hosting?
Big providers burn money on marketing, then pass the bill to you. Smaller providers can't afford that luxury — they have to compete on specs.
I found Hostup the hard way: googling "alternatives to Hetzner," pinging their servers to test latency, hunting down Reddit reviews. Their location (Sweden) felt legitimate. It took a few hours, and I let the idea marinate for a few days before committing.
As a solo founder, every dollar I don't burn buys me another week of runway. Ideas take time to succeed — and time costs money.
Those savings compound in ways I didn't expect. The extra $19/month now funds AI tools, design subscriptions, and other services that actually help me ship.
Better yet, the beefier specs let me run multiple projects on a single instance instead of renting separate servers.
I can launch and experiment without a nagging voice in my head calculating burn rate. A fixed price lets me play the long game.
Migration took 4 hours. At $19/month in savings, I broke even in under a week. Now I build instead of worry.
Here's the thing: if we throw business to smaller providers, big players have to sweat a little. They improve. We get more for less.
This is exactly what I'm trying to do as a solo founder: take a cut from what the big players are doing. But I need people to give smaller options a chance.
Don't default to the big names. A few hours of research can unlock serious savings and better specs.
Look at your current stack. Even if a smaller provider costs the same, supporting them keeps the market honest. When you evaluate any third-party service, check if there's a smaller player worth your business.
After a week of spelunking through benchmarks and Reddit threads, I surfaced with Hostup — a Swedish provider I'd never heard of.
Their VPSBenchmarks score: 83, with A grades for disk I/O and network performance. For $4.55/month, they offer 2 vCPU, 4GB RAM, 50GB NVMe SSD on EPYC processors, and 7 free backups. A comparable plan on DigitalOcean costs $24.
I'm now paying roughly 20% of what I would have paid for similar specs.
I assumed smaller providers were shaky. They don't have the name recognition of Hetzner or DigitalOcean, so you have to dig to find them. Most developers default to the big names because who wants to spend an afternoon researching server hosting?
Big providers burn money on marketing, then pass the bill to you. Smaller providers can't afford that luxury — they have to compete on specs.
I found Hostup the hard way: googling "alternatives to Hetzner," pinging their servers to test latency, hunting down Reddit reviews. Their location (Sweden) felt legitimate. It took a few hours, and I let the idea marinate for a few days before committing.
As a solo founder, every dollar I don't burn buys me another week of runway. Ideas take time to succeed — and time costs money.
Those savings compound in ways I didn't expect. The extra $19/month now funds AI tools, design subscriptions, and other services that actually help me ship.
Better yet, the beefier specs let me run multiple projects on a single instance instead of renting separate servers.
I can launch and experiment without a nagging voice in my head calculating burn rate. A fixed price lets me play the long game.
Migration took 4 hours. At $19/month in savings, I broke even in under a week. Now I build instead of worry.
Here's the thing: if we throw business to smaller providers, big players have to sweat a little. They improve. We get more for less.
This is exactly what I'm trying to do as a solo founder: take a cut from what the big players are doing. But I need people to give smaller options a chance.
Don't default to the big names. A few hours of research can unlock serious savings and better specs.
Look at your current stack. Even if a smaller provider costs the same, supporting them keeps the market honest. When you evaluate any third-party service, check if there's a smaller player worth your business.