DEV Community: Mohammad Alsaraf

The $0.25 Burner VPS Is the Best Thing I Didn't Know I Needed

Mohammad Alsaraf — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 17:44:36 +0000

Here's a scenario I've been in too many times: I need to test something in a clean Linux environment. Not my laptop — a real server. And I need it for maybe two hours.
My options used to be:

Spin up a DigitalOcean droplet, forget to delete it, notice three weeks later that I've spent $18
Use a Docker container locally, except the whole point is testing how it behaves with real inbound traffic
Ask a friend if I can SSH into something (awkward)
Use some free tier that takes 15 minutes to provision and has weird restrictions
NATBox has a thing called a Burner VPS.

It's $0.25. It lasts 24 hours. After that it's gone — automatically wiped, no lingering data, no grace period, nothing.
I've used it four times now. Twice for testing deployment scripts against a fresh Debian install. Once to spin up a quick reverse proxy for something I was debugging. Once just because I wanted to see what Alpine Linux looks like when you actually have to configure it from scratch.
The workflow is: order it, get SSH credentials in your inbox, do your thing, walk away. You don't have to delete it. You don't have to remember it exists. It costs less than a candy bar.
If you've ever thought "I just need a throwaway server for a few hours" — this is exactly that. The fact that it auto-deletes is actually a feature, not a limitation. No cleanup. No accidentally running up charges. No orphaned droplets sitting around costing you $6/mo because you forgot.
natbox.io, Burner plan, $0.25. I don't know why more hosting providers don't offer this.

I Spent $0.99 on a VPS and Honestly? It Works.

Mohammad Alsaraf — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 17:31:20 +0000

I've been running side projects on the internet for about six years now. In that time I've paid for shared hosting, a few droplets, a couple of hetzner boxes, and one time I rented a dedicated server for something that absolutely did not need a dedicated server. You know how it goes.
A few months ago I needed something small — just a place to run a lightweight Python script that checks a price API every 15 minutes and pings me when something changes. Nothing fancy. The script uses maybe 20MB of RAM when it's running. I did not need a $6/mo DigitalOcean droplet for this. I especially did not need the "recommended" $12/mo plan with 2GB RAM and backups enabled.
I found NATBox while scrolling through some forum thread. Someone mentioned they'd been using it for bots and small automation jobs. The pricing page said $0.99/mo for 256MB RAM, 3GB SSD, and — this part caught my eye — 20 dedicated ports.
I thought: okay, this is probably some sketchy thing running on someone's gaming PC. Let me try it anyway.
What actually happens when you order
The ordering process is manual, which sounds alarming but in practice is fine. You fill out a form, they send you a PayPal or crypto payment link within an hour or two, and once you pay, they provision your container and email you an SSH command. No control panel. No wizard. Just:
ssh root@147.135.215.238 -p [your_port]
And that's it. You're in. Full root. Real Linux.
The ports thing
This is actually the clever part. NATBox runs LXC containers behind a shared IP, so instead of giving you a dedicated public IP, they give you 20 dedicated ports on their host. Port 1 is your SSH. Ports 2-20 forward into your container.
For my use case — a script that doesn't need any inbound connections — this doesn't matter at all. But if you're running a web server, a bot, a game server, a proxy, whatever: you just bind to the port inside your container and it's reachable from the outside world at that port on the host IP. It works.
One month in
The script runs. It has not gone down. I paid $0.99. I have genuinely nothing to complain about.
Would I run a production app with real users here? Probably not — not because of reliability concerns, but because you'd want a dedicated IP, more RAM headroom, and the ability to scale. But for bots, scrapers, learning projects, dev environments, or just having a Linux shell in the cloud? NATBox is legitimately good.
The fact that it exists at $0.99 is kind of wild. I keep expecting to find the catch. So far there isn't one.
Find it at: natbox.io — Nano plan, $0.99/mo

Why I Built a $0.99 VPS and What I Learned

Mohammad Alsaraf — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 10:42:23 +0000

I got tired of paying $5-10/mo for a VPS I only needed to run a bot or test a script. So I built NATBox — NAT-based Linux containers starting at $0.99/mo. Here's what I actually learned building it.
NAT vs dedicated IP — most people don't need a dedicated IP
The whole idea behind NAT VPS is simple: instead of giving each container its own public IP (expensive), you share one host IP and assign each container a dedicated range of ports. 20 ports per container, forwarded via iptables from the host. Port 1 of your range is SSH. Ports 2-20 are yours — run web servers, bots, proxies, whatever.
For most lightweight workloads, this is completely fine. You only need a dedicated IP if you're running something that requires it — like a mail server. For everything else, 20 ports is plenty.
The provisioning stack is a bash script
No Laravel. No Node. No fancy dashboard. The entire backend — create, suspend, renew, delete, expiry checks, email notifications, iptables rules — is a single bash script managing LXC containers and a pipe-delimited flat file as a database.
It's not pretty, but it's reliable, fast, and I understand every line of it. When something breaks at 2am, I can fix it in under 5 minutes.
The weirdest bugs I hit
Building this taught me more about Linux internals than anything else I've done. A few memorable ones:

pam_loginuid.so

was silently killing SSH sessions inside LXC because /

proc/self/loginuid

isn't writable in containers. The fix: comment it out in

/etc/pam.d/sshd

before the container ever boots.
dnf on Fedora was getting OOM-killed inside 256MB containers just resolving package metadata. Fix: pre-create a 512MB swapfile on the host into the container's rootfs before starting it.
OpenSSH 9.2 on Debian 12 calls

linux_audit_write_entry()

during session open, which requires

CAP_AUDIT_WRITE

. I dropped that cap in an earlier version and SSH started dying immediately after auth. One of those bugs that takes an hour to find and 3 seconds to fix.

What $0.99/mo actually gets you
256MB RAM, 3GB SSD, 20 dedicated ports, full root access, your choice of 6 distros. It's a real Linux container, not a toy. I run bots on nano plans. People use them for proxies, learning environments, lightweight APIs, scrapers, testing.
If you want to try it: natbox.io