About

We are actually a group of two: “small” and “pancake”. So that’s why together we are smallpancakes with the plural! It’s mostly just pancake around here. (＾▽＾) And it’s also pancake who’s spending all the money 💸

I started my self-hosting journey in 2025 after discovering LowEndTalk (LET). I realized I kept forgetting how I did things after finishing them. Even scarier, I couldn’t even keep track of exactly what I had bought! So, I wanted a place to put down everything.

If you find the notes helpful, please consider supporting by purchasing through the affiliate (aff) links. Just to be clear—even if a service turns out to be a bad experience, I will still include the aff link if I have it. After all, it was MY bad experience and I can’t pass up opportunities to help support me buying more “idlers” 🤣

Aff links are marked with (aff). I don’t like to trick people into clicking things. In case I forgot to mark it, the links will start with https://aff.af.

LET is a very interesting place. I hope that after reading the articles here, I encourage that you can participate in the community there. Remember to BE NICE!

Providers I’ve Purchased From

README

Most providers from this site are on LowEndTalk (LET). LET is a community/forum for finding budget-friendly hosting deals. The hosting services here are mostly unmanaged. Which means you should investigate first before reaching out to support. Also, there’s always a risk of providers to deadpool. Please check the provider’s Terms of Service before purchasing.

Hosting

VPS

  • linveo – mostly stable, but the servers I got later made this look a bit expensive in my collection.
  • GreenCloud (aff) – one incident of sudden IP change notified through email, but overall it has been stable to use.
  • Onidel (aff) – premium provider on this list. They have their own panel and fast turnaround time for tickets.
  • HostBilby – owner seems like a cool dude, still idling it, no comments yet.
  • SolidVPS (aff)
  • DeluxHost – cheap servers, but as I’m still idling it, no comments yet.
  • SmokyHosts – server had been shut down once for unknown reasons. My main concern is that their terms of use have somewhat unreasonable penalties, and I’m a bit worried about accidentally triggering them.

Shared Hosting

  • HostBrr (aff) – Very cheap, and they handle tickets in a reasonable time. Great reviews on LET. However, my account was once suspended while transferring a WP backup. It was lifted after ticketing. For some reason, the DA panel often locked me out when I was actively working on a site.
  • NameCrane – Reasonable ticket response time, and they are actively on Discord and reply to more generic questions too.
  • xHosts – Resells 20i packages and offers one-time plans. Uses StackCP and has CDN. I’m observing uptime > 99.9%. Downside is that if you don’t point your nameservers to them, you’ll have to handle TLS certificates by yourself.

Email

  • NameCrane
  • MXRoute

Others

  • s.ee