Just wanted to introduce people here to the world of low end VPS options.
Digital Ocean’s lowest tier costs $5 per month, which is $60 per year, and offers a relatively powerful server with very good control panel and 1 terabyte of traffic. It’s not a bad offer per se, but there are more affordable and better options out there.
https://lowendstock.com is a go-to website to search for cheaper servers. There is also https://lowendbox.com, but you’d have to manually search through the posts there to find what you need.
These servers are cheaper for a reason. Some of the providers don’t have 24/7 support, or may not offer support at all. There will be less CPU power and RAM. Control panel won’t be as beautiful and may have less options. These drawbacks won’t affect your experience with Outline, but they are still there and I have to warn about them.
Important! To be able to run Outline, the server has to fit following requirements:
- Based on KVM or OpenVZ 7 virtualisation. OpenVZ 6 cannot run Docker!
- At least one dedicated IPv4 address. Outline won’t run on servers with shared IP address + NAT routing of ports.
- At least 256 MB of RAM is recommended; 512 MB is more than you’ll ever need.
And that’s about it. Buy the server, log into it via SSH, execute Outline’s manual installation script (can be found in Outline Manager → Setup new server → Advanced), copy the result, and you’re good to go.
For the past year, I’ve been using $14 per year server in Moldova with infinite 100 Mbps traffic, and it ran great. Yesterday, I switched to €18 per year option in Romania with infinite 1000 Mbps traffic, and it runs just as well. I won’t name exact providers, but I found both offers on the LowEndStock website.
Cheers!