Show HN: Server Hunter – Easily browse over 11,000 VPS and Dedicated Servers

The idea of creating a index of server providers is good, but all implementations are less-than-ideal, and in the worst case, useless. The core problem here is data quality, the magnitude of noise is usually high:

* The server providers do not give out machine-readable data.

* It's difficult to distinguish some details from specifications, such as vCPUs or dedicated cores.

* Promotions and discounts cannot be recognized programmatically.

* There's no reliable way to detect discontinued or withdrawn plans.

Ultimately, people will find the result of their search is either withdrawn or unusable for some reasons, and they still have to purchase the server from a well-known provider... And lurking at lowendtalk.com is still a better way to find a good deal.

Improving the quality of data sounds like a good machine-learning project.

Thank you! Unfortunately, I haven't found many providers offering this, but I'll look into adding it for the ones that do.

In the meantime, you could ping their domain name to get a rough idea (if they don't use CloudFlare or block ICMP) and contact their sales team to see if they can hook you up with something more accurate.

It shows they are responsive and open. Also they know so few people will do this it doesn't matter.

You're absolutely right, getting accurate data is one of the biggest challenges we're facing at the moment. I'd like to believe we're making great progress with it though. :)

Initially, we started off with static data together with a management panel for hosts to add/edit/delete their offers. As you might have guessed, most providers didn't feel like doing this, and those that did made mistakes entering the data or didn't keep it up to date.

This is why we've put most of our effort into automating the data feeds and getting up to date information. Right now, 60.3% of our offers are automatically retrieved from the provider and kept up to date every 24 hours.

Whenever a provider adds, edits or deletes an offer from their website, it's automatically synced to our website accordingly. We also try to do this for stock, but some providers do not expose this information before ordering.

While I'll freely admit we still have mistakes on our website, I hope that it's still useful in finding the right server for your needs, and appreciate your patience while we keep working on improving it every day. :)

P.S: We have deployed some small scale machine learning and are experimenting with it as we go, but since our knowledge in this field is lacking, progress will be slow.

You didn't miss it, we're still trying to figure out the more complex pricing systems of providers like AWS/GCE/Azure. Just to give you an idea, the JSON file describing the EC2 pricing is 650+ MB. :)

We have added AWS Lightsail since the pricing is a bit more straight forward and I'll double check tomorrow if there's anything from GCE and Azure we can add.