TLDR: Is mikr.us worth buying? Yes, if you need VPS for your personal project.
Why do I write it?
A few days ago, Jakub, the owner of this service sent some information that he’s giving access to mikr.us for an honest review of it. I don’t need access to mikr.us because I’m already a client so instead of that I only write my review here. I didn’t receive anything for this review, everything you can read here is just my personal opinion. I believe if something is good then it should be shared to others to use good things.
UPDATE: After publishing this post, Jakub extended my subscription for mikr.us.
The beginning
Last year, I needed to run some code that is accessible from the internet. This code was in JavaScript/Python and my current hosting didn’t allow me to run such code because they support only PHP, I needed to find something else. So, I was looking for some cheap VPS and I found really cheap VPS called mikr.us. It’s created by Jakub Mrugalski, I follow him on social media so it’s easier to buy something from someone you know (more or less).
I bought the better machine (that time there were only two options Mikrus 1.0 and Mikrus 2.0) which was Mikrus 2.0. After a few months when Mikrus 3.0 was introduced, I switched to it.
How did I use it?
As I told you already, I wanted to run some code, it was very simple code, there was a simple website with one input then the text from this input was processed by some logic, and the output was returned to the user. No magic was there.
I knew how to create a server based on NodeJS so it wasn’t a challenge for me. My first challenge was public/private IP. mikr.us provides us with two public IPs but there are IPv6 which aren’t supported everywhere yet. At first, I was thinking I’m more clever than I actually am. I tried to ping this address from my computer, I tried to get access to this server via a browser. Then, I realized, I can’t be the only person with this problem, others also bought this VPS and they use it somehow, so I started looking for knowledge. I found the solution on the Facebook group, more about it later. After some posts on Facebook, I found the solution which wasn’t that difficult for any admin with at least some experience but for me, it wasn’t clear at first. The solution was to use Cloudflare, it took 10 minutes to configure it 🙂
Then, I configured nginx somehow, maybe not in a secure way but it worked for me, at least. After basic configuration, I didn’t use it a lot related to configuration or DevOps stuff, I spent the rest of the time developing my application. My opinion is based on that experience.
Price
There are three different options, the cheapest one is 35zÅ‚ (~8$) and you’ll receive 384 MB RAM and 5GB drive space. The middle option is for 65zÅ‚ (~14$) per year, here you have 768 MB RAM and 10 GB drive space, it’s enough for a small server for someone without much experience. The best option is the third one, which costs 130zÅ‚ (~32$) per year and you have 2GB RAM and 25GB drive space. I have the third option because compared to other prices it’s still very cheap. If you want to see more details, check the mikr.us (link) website.
Facebook group
I think this is the most important thing in this service. You don’t have to buy mikr.us (link) to join. It’s open for everyone, of course, if you ask questions about not related things, admins might not like it. However, there is one con, it’s mostly in Polish, so you need to translate posts but if you answer questions in English I think you’ll receive answers as most people in IT speak English anyway. I saw people there asking very basic questions and they weren’t ignored, they always received answers or clues where to find them.
In that group there are a lot more activities than Q&A. A few months ago there was a published broken machine. Why? It was an exercise for admins to learn how to fix the broken configurations. Of course, it was for free.
In this group, I found a solution on how to connect to my VPS from home using IPv6. I think it was the most popular post when I was checking this group.
Additional and extend options
When you buy mirk.us you’ll gain access to the web panel of your VPS. It’s not only panel to reset your root password, btw I used it once 😉 but you can find many options to extend your VPS or fix it when you break something. For example, you can configure cytr.us which boosts your website, wire ground VPN which of course is VPN 🙂 or if you need more storage you can buy it using NextCloud.
There is also M.A.R.I.A.N. which should help you if you destroy your VPS, I don’t know how it works in practice but as I saw in the group, it’s not that bad.
I didn’t use most of these options but you can see the web panel here:
There is one more interesting tool that is running in the background, I don’t remember where I saw/heard it but there is a bot that checks weak passwords. If you have a weak root password you’ll be notified by the system. It’s an interesting thing to force people to improve security.
Why shouldn’t You buy mikr.us?
Mirk.us isn’t for everyone, it has specific rules. You’ll see these rules before you buy it and every time when you connect to it. One of them is scanning. You aren’t allowed to scan networks or do any attacks. If you do that, the whole server can be blocked by the provider. If you want to use this VPS as a proxy for attacks, I think it’s not the best place.
You can’t there run game servers like Counter-Strike or voice servers like TeamSpeak.
For us, developers, these rules don’t have any influence.
Conclusion
As you might notice, I use mikr.us for a few months and I’m satisfied with it. It works ok, there isn’t any problem with this service. The support is awesome. I think you won’t find anything better for this price. The price for the cheapest machine is around 8$ per year so I think it’s much faster and easier to use than clouds because if you misconfigure the cloud it’s much easier to lose money or if you forget about the cloud you’ll be charged but if you forget about mirk.us, nothing happens.
The link to the mikr.us you can find here, it’s not an affiliate link.
