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NOTE: Even though I've accepted an answer for this, if you have a better one, please put it below. Thanks!

I'm looking for recommendations from the wise and all-knowing Server Fault community on cloud hosting providers that support running FreeBSD. Ideally ones that don't require special tweaks to the FreeBSD system, but any recommendations would be appreciated. Suggestions? Recommendations? Advice? Tips? War stories? Thanks in advance.

EDIT: Ideally I'm looking for virtual providers, but will consider bare-metal options too. Will leave the question open for a few more days and then pick an answer, thanks to those that have submitted so far.

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  • Attention would-be advertisers, if you would like to advertise your product on questions like this one, please see the FAQ: serverfault.com/faq#promotion
    – Chris S
    Oct 28, 2010 at 12:45
  • You can also take a look at lowendbox.com for a list of cheap VPSes across the US and UK. I imagine some of the given answers here should also be listed on lowendbox.com, but probably aren't. It's a useful aggregation of such, though. Sep 19, 2012 at 2:20
  • digitalocean.com added FreeBSD in 2015 digitalocean.com/company/blog/… Mar 13, 2016 at 12:39

7 Answers 7

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http://arpnetworks.com/ gives very affordable VPS solutions. You get VNC and serial console access, and can boot off an unmodified FreeBSD-8.0 release DVD in the "tray", so you can rewrite your boot disk to your heart's content. Very happy with them.

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  • I too have been very happy thus far with ARPNetworks :)
    – Justin
    May 3, 2011 at 22:00
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I have been using RootBSD (http://www.rootbsd.net/) for years and remain impressed. Low-cost, excellent tech support. Lots of different VPS plans.

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    Thanks Paul! I'm assuming it is fair to say that you haven't experienced any reliability issues with FreeBSD in a Xen environment? Nov 1, 2010 at 0:31
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Mine are hosted at joinvps.com; I have to admit I was worried when their prices started at $5/mo, but I haven't had a single problem yet. I haven't contacted their support either, so I don't know how good their support is, again no problems necessitating it.

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    Contacted support the other day about IPv6 support. It's typical Engrish, but understandable and they seem to know what they're talking about. (IPv6 will be supported ~2011Q1)
    – Chris S
    Jan 19, 2011 at 22:12
  • @ChrisS Did the IPV6 support come in as planned?
    – Basic
    Feb 20, 2012 at 15:01
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It might be worth looking at non-virtualised (bare metal) cloud infrastructure providers. The two that I know of are SoftLayer's offering and NewServers (which I use, albeit with Linux).

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I second the suggestion of NewServers. I use them and they give you all the benefits of cloud hosting, but the flexibility of dedicated bare-metal servers.

I don't know if they have FreeBSD images, but even if they don't you get complete access to the server. So you can view the console, reboot, go into the BIOS, store an image to be booted from and install FreeBSD yourself. Then create images, clone servers and tweak FreeBSD to your heart's content.

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Amazon EC2 is supported with FreeBSD 8.2-RC1.

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    Do you know if FreeBSD mangled their memory code or Amazon updated their ancient version of Xen? I know people have been looking for this for a while now.
    – Chris S
    Jan 19, 2011 at 22:12
  • No idea.. Was looking into another XEN type virtualization with some committers and someone mentioned EC2 worked on 8.1 with a patch and it was inlined in 8.2.
    – Essobi
    Jan 19, 2011 at 22:37
  • All versions of FreeBSD are available on AWS. The images are maintained by Colin Percival, one of the FreeBSD developers and security officer emeritus: daemonology.net/freebsd-on-ec2
    – Utkonos
    Jan 23, 2014 at 8:42
  • As of early 2016, FreeBSD 10.2 is on AWS Marketplace. Mar 13, 2016 at 12:38
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There also is CloudSigma in Switzerland which might be a good choice if you're concerned about US Internet legislature and privacy related stuff.

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