Run Prometheus on a dedicated Cloud VPS for unlimited metric collection, long-term retention, and AlertManager routing. No Grafana Cloud per-series billing — store months of metrics from all your infrastructure at flat cost.
Managed Prometheus (Grafana Cloud, AWS AMP) charges per metric series ingested. Self-hosted Prometheus stores unlimited metric series from all your infrastructure on NVMe SSD at a flat monthly cost.
Grafana Cloud: $8/mo per 10k active series. AWS Managed Prometheus: $0.90/million samples. Self-hosted Prometheus on a $5/mo VPS ingests unlimited metrics from unlimited hosts at flat cost.
Managed Prometheus limits retention (Grafana Cloud: 13 days free). Configure Prometheus on a VPS to retain metrics for months or years — limited only by NVMe disk capacity.
Node Exporter, MySQL Exporter, PostgreSQL Exporter, Redis Exporter, Nginx Exporter, MongoDB Exporter, Kubernetes metrics — any OpenMetrics-compatible endpoint scraped without managed service exporter restrictions.
AlertManager deduplicates, groups, and routes alerts to Slack, PagerDuty, OpsGenie, email, Telegram, and webhooks. Silences, inhibition rules, and time-based routing — full alert management infrastructure on your VPS.
The optimal software stack pre-configured for this use case on a Host4Fun Cloud VPS.
Get up and running on a fresh Host4Fun Cloud VPS with these commands.
Everything that makes Host4Fun Cloud VPS the ideal infrastructure for your use case.
Prometheus stores time-series data in its local TSDB on NVMe SSD. Fast writes for high-cardinality metric ingestion and fast reads for PromQL range queries over large time windows.
PromQL aggregates, filters, and computes metrics with functions like rate(), irate(), histogram_quantile(), and label_replace(). Write alert rules and dashboard queries that managed services restrict or charge extra for.
AlertManager receives Prometheus alerts and routes them based on configurable rules — group by service, silence during maintenance windows, inhibit child alerts when parent fires, and route critical alerts to PagerDuty vs warnings to Slack.
Any service with a Prometheus exporter is scrapeable — MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB, Nginx, HAProxy, Kafka, RabbitMQ, and thousands of community exporters. No managed service restrictions on which exporters you can use.
Configure `--storage.tsdb.retention.time=365d` for 1-year metric history. NVMe SSD with efficient TSDB compression stores months of metrics. Pair with Thanos for infinite retention using object storage.
Instrument your applications with the Prometheus client library (Python, Node.js, Go, Java) to expose custom /metrics endpoints. Track business-specific metrics — order rates, user signups, cache hit rates — alongside infrastructure metrics.
How a self-managed Host4Fun Cloud VPS compares to shared hosting and managed cloud services.
| Feature | Host4Fun Cloud VPS | Grafana Cloud | AWS Managed Prometheus | Datadog |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Per-Series Cost | $0 | $8/mo per 10k series | $0.90/1M samples | $15+/host |
| Metric Retention | Unlimited | 13 days free | 150 days | 15 months |
| Custom Exporters | ||||
| AlertManager | managed | |||
| Monthly Cost | $5/mo flat | $8+/mo | $0.90+/1M samples | $15+/host |
Real use cases from developers, agencies, and businesses running on Host4Fun Cloud VPS.
Scrape Node Exporter from all your servers — CPU, memory, disk, network metrics centralized in one Prometheus instance. AlertManager fires when any server breaches thresholds.
Instrument microservices and monoliths to expose custom Prometheus metrics. Centralized Prometheus scrapes all services — request rates, error rates, queue depths, and cache hit ratios in one place.
AlertManager routes production alerts with deduplication, grouping, and escalation. Critical alerts page the on-call engineer; warnings notify the team Slack channel; infrastructure alerts route to DevOps.
MySQL Exporter, PostgreSQL Exporter, and Redis Exporter provide deep database metrics. Alert on slow query increases, connection pool exhaustion, replication lag, and memory pressure.
SRE engineers learning PromQL, alert rule design, and Prometheus federation need a real Prometheus installation. A $5/mo VPS provides the complete hands-on learning environment.
Define Service Level Objectives in Prometheus recording rules. AlertManager fires SLO breach alerts when error budget is consumed. Grafana SLO dashboards visualize remaining error budget.
All plans include AMD Ryzen CPU, DDR5 RAM, NVMe SSD, 10 Gbps, DDoS protection, and dedicated IPv4.
Annual billing charged as one payment. Prices exclude taxes.
Unlimited metrics. Unlimited retention. AlertManager routing. NVMe TSDB. From $5/mo.