# TierHive

> Build-your-own NAT KVM servers from $0.000135 an hour, with a private /24, two forwarded TCP ports and a shared HAProxy — cheap, hourly, and explicitly still in Alpha.

Website: https://tierhive.com  
Guide page: https://botperch.com/providers/tierhive/  
Checked: 2026-11-04

**Short answer:** One always-on personal agent (2 vCPU / 4 GiB / 20 GiB) costs about $2.98 a month here, the cheapest of the 24 providers that run it as described. The AI model adds $7.30 to $488.07 a month on top, depending on the model: MiniMax M3.1 Flash at the low end, $204.19 or more on a frontier model such as Claude Opus 5.5, up to GPT-6 Astra. That assumes 144 million tokens a month (30 requests a day × 160k tokens × 30 days, our assumption) at the median zero-retention price of each model. Fits well: A throwaway box for an experiment, a test deploy or a CI job: $0.003886 an hour for 4 GiB and 10 GB, deleted when the job ends.

TierHive rents KVM virtual machines by the hour at the lowest end of the market. You do not pick from a plan list: you move sliders for RAM (128 MB to 8 GB in 128 MB steps), NVMe (1 to 50 GB) and, in four locations, HDD up to 4 TB, then choose a CPU-priority, IOPS and network tier. The smallest configuration, 128 MB of RAM with 1 GB of disk, is $0.000135 an hour — about ten cents for a 720-hour month.
The unusual part is the network. A server does not get its own public IPv4. Each account gets a private /24 that is meshed across locations, and each server gets two forwarded TCP ports and two UDP ports on the public address of the machine it runs on. The first TCP port is always mapped to the server's port 22, so SSH arrives on a random high port of a shared IP. Web traffic normally goes through the free shared HAProxy instead: you add a domain in the panel, point DNS at TierHive, and it terminates TLS with a Let's Encrypt certificate. An IPv6 /64 per location is also available, up to ten addresses per server, which opens nearly all ports and removes the NAT limit.
vCPU is not something you buy. A server with 2 GB of RAM or less gets one vCPU and anything larger gets two, so two is the ceiling. The CPU is shared and weighted by the priority tier you pay for, and a server that averages a full core for two hours is cut to half a core until it reboots.
Billing is prepaid: one token is one US dollar, the first top-up is $3, and each server bills its hourly rate with a one-hour minimum. The operator says a server that is powered off bills only its storage, and that deleting it ends the bill immediately. There is no monthly price and no monthly cap.
TierHive is candid about what it is not. Its acceptable-use policy says the service is in Alpha, that data loss can occur at any time without warning, that backups are the customer's responsibility, and that there is no SLA. The About page says it is a budget service on older hardware, that it is not the place to host anything you need uptime for, and that if data is lost you get a fresh, blank server rather than a recovery.

**Who it is for:** Readers who want the cheapest possible Linux box for a hobby agent, a bot, a test box or a throwaway node, who can work a console, and who keep their own backups. Not for production, not for anything that needs a public IPv4 of its own, more than two vCPUs, or a promise about uptime.

**Isolation:** A VPS (virtual private server), not a sandbox built for agents. A KVM virtual machine with its own kernel and root, on the operator's own QEMU/KVM/libvirt stack. CPU and disk I/O are shared and weighted, not dedicated; a server that averages a full core for two hours is throttled to half a core until it is rebooted.

**Sizes and regions:** Build your own: RAM 128 MB to 8 GB in 128 MB steps, NVMe 1 to 50 GB, HDD up to 4,000 GB in London, Singapore, Sydney and Vint Hill, plus backup and snapshot storage. vCPU is not a choice — one core up to 2 GB of RAM, two cores above it, never more. 8 GB is not available in every location (Tokyo tops out at 1 GB). 19 locations across Europe, North America, South America, Asia-Pacific and Africa.

## How it charges

- model: Prepaid hourly tokens at $1 each. No subscription and no monthly plan: you add credit and each server draws its hourly rate until you delete it. The first top-up is $3.
- meter: A per-hour price built from published resource rates — RAM $0.0009216 per GiB-hour, NVMe $0.00002 per GB-hour, HDD $0.000007, backup storage $0.000005, snapshots $0.00002 — plus optional priority tiers at $0.00002 (Medium) or $0.00003 (High) an hour each. The panel's own estimate uses 720 hours for a month.
- stopped: The operator says a powered-off server bills only its storage, and that deleting it stops the charge. A stop is a power-off, so memory and running processes are lost; nothing resumes where it left off. The stopped-state details are only in the operator's forum offers, not on tierhive.com.
- planFee: There is no platform fee and no plan. The only extra charges in the price feed are the DHCP fee (about $0.0007 a month), backup creation and restore fees, and backup or snapshot storage.
- minimum: One hour per server, and a $3 first top-up. A ten-minute server costs an hour; 1,000 ten-minute servers cost 1,000 hours.

A build-your-own NAT server billed by the hour from three published resource rates (RAM per MB-hour, NVMe per GB-hour, optional priority tiers), with a one-hour minimum per server and, per the operator, only storage billed while it is powered off.
- Rates come from the calculator's own data feed, https://tierhive.com/api/pricing.php: RAM 0.00000090 tokens per MB-hour, NVMe 0.00002000 per GB-hour, HDD 0.00000700 per GB-hour, backup storage 0.00000500 per GB-hour, snapshots 0.00002000 per GB-hour, and a DHCP charge of 0.00000100 per hour plus a one-off activation. One token is $1.
- Each shape's hourly price is those rates applied to its RAM and NVMe with low-priority CPU, IOPS and network, and reproduces the provider's own cards (128 MB / 1 GB = 0.000135, 2 GB / 25 GB = 0.002343, 4 GB / 50 GB = 0.004686). The card lists seven representative points because TierHive is build-your-own: RAM is any 128 MB step from 128 MB to 8 GB, NVMe any GB from 1 to 50. Priority tiers add 0.00002/h each for Medium and 0.00003/h for High, which is not included here.
- Units: TierHive's calculator runs its RAM slider in MB and the site calls 8 GB what the feed calls 8,192 MB, so its MB and GB are binary and a per-GB-hour rate is treated here as per GiB-hour, with each shape's disk size mapped 1:1 to the engine's GiB. That mapping is an inference for disk, since no page defines the unit in bytes. If the disk GB is decimal, every disk charge rises by 7.37% (A $3.90, B $6.17, C $0.65); disk.decimalGB is deliberately not set, because the provider's own 8 GB = 8,192 MB labelling points to binary units.
- vCPU is not a control: it is 1 up to 2 GiB of RAM and 2 above that, so a 4 vCPU machine cannot be bought at any price. Workload B is therefore priced on the 8 GiB shape the provider would sell, and the engine flags the shortfall.
- A one-hour minimum per server is modelled with wholeHours. The operator states it in its offer post: "You can create a VPS or 253 VPS with a 1-hour minimum and you are only billed for that hour". Whether a 90-minute server bills 1.5 or 2 hours is not published; A, B and C are unaffected.
- While powered off the card bills disk only, at the same NVMe rate as when running. That follows the operator's offer posts ("You only pay for storage when the VPS is powered off") rather than any page on tierhive.com, and the exact stopped-state charges — backup storage, the DHCP fee, whether RAM is really dropped — are not published. If stopped hours were billed at the running rate, C would cost $2.98 instead of $0.62; B is unaffected.
- Nothing caps a month: there is no monthly price, so an always-on server costs 730 hours of its hourly rate. The provider's own monthly estimates use 720 hours (24 × 30), which is why its cards read a little lower than 730 hours here.
- Not priced: the DHCP charge (about $0.0007 a month), backup creation and restore fees ($0.00002 each), backup and snapshot storage, HDD at 0.000007/GB-h in London, Singapore, Sydney and Vint Hill, and a network-backed storage rate in the feed with no documented product.
- The price feed lists 19 locations with per-location RAM ceilings (8 GB in Amsterdam, Beauharnois, Frankfurt, Gravelines, London, New York, Sydney and Vancouver; 1 GB in Tokyo) and speed limits from 50 to 300 Mbit/s. Only one region is modelled here, since price does not vary by location.
- This is an Alpha service: the operator's own policy says data loss can occur without warning and that there is no SLA. The price is real, the durability is not promised.

## Monthly cost for each preset workload

- A personal agent that stays on (Hermes, OpenClaw): $2.98
- A coding agent for one developer: $1.91 (catch: No size has 4 vCPU and 8 GiB; the largest is 2 vCPU / 8 GiB.)
- A code interpreter inside your product: $77.73
- A browser agent for a small team: $116.59
- Self-hosted n8n for a small team: $2.98
- A Discord or Slack bot for one server: $1.71
- Claude Code for a team of five: $9.55 (catch: No size has 4 vCPU and 8 GiB; the largest is 2 vCPU / 8 GiB.)
- A scraper that runs four times a day: $0.28
- Your own remote MCP server: $0.82
- A: 1,000 short tasks: $3.89
- B: one always-on box: $6.11 (catch: No size has 4 vCPU and 8 GiB; the largest is 2 vCPU / 8 GiB.)
- C: three hours a day: $0.62

## Fits well

- A throwaway box for an experiment, a test deploy or a CI job: $0.003886 an hour for 4 GiB and 10 GB, deleted when the job ends.
- A hobby agent, Discord or Slack bot, or small MCP server that needs a cheap always-on Linux box and can live behind a forwarded port or the shared HAProxy.
- Three hours a day of work on a machine that keeps its files: about $0.62 a month at 4 GiB and 20 GB, most of it storage while stopped.
- A homelab spread across 19 locations with a private /24 meshed between them, for WireGuard relays, monitoring probes or redundant small services.

## Fits badly

- Anything that needs its own public IPv4, more than two forwarded TCP ports, or a fixed address other services can allowlist.
- Anything with four or more vCPUs, more than 8 GB of RAM, a GPU or a dedicated core.
- Production, or data you cannot lose: the operator's own policy says data loss can occur at any time and that there is no SLA.
- A team that needs sub-users, SSO or an audit trail, or a buyer who needs a SOC 2 report or a data processing agreement.
- Scraping at scale: the acceptable-use policy forbids automated scraping of external sites without prior written approval.

## Features

- **Isolation** (yes): KVM, root, nesting on. A real KVM guest built on the operator's own QEMU/KVM/libvirt stack, with root, Docker recipes and CPU passthrough and nesting enabled. What is not dedicated is the CPU: cores are shared and weighted by the priority tier you buy, the provider warns that steal will be higher than on an enterprise host, and a server that averages a full core for two hours is cut to half a core until it reboots. [source](https://tierhive.com/about.php) [docs](https://tierhive.com/about.php)
- **Sizes and regions** (partly): 128 MB–8 GiB, 1–2 vCPU. RAM is any 128 MB step from 128 MB to 8 GB and NVMe any GB from 1 to 50, with HDD to 4,000 GB in four locations — a genuinely build-your-own machine. The catch is the CPU: one vCPU up to 2 GB of RAM and two above it, never more, so the 4 vCPU in workload B cannot be bought. 8 GB is also location-dependent (Tokyo tops out at 1 GB), and there are 19 locations across Europe, the Americas, Asia-Pacific and Africa. [source](https://tierhive.com/) [docs](https://tierhive.com/#calculator)
- **Lifecycle** (partly): Stop = power off, disk kept. A stop is a power-off, so memory and processes are gone; the files stay and, per the operator, only storage bills until you start it again. Deleting the server ends the charge immediately. There is no pause that keeps memory, no hibernation, no fork and no snapshot of a running process, and the stopped-state billing is stated in the operator's forum offers rather than on tierhive.com. [source](https://lowendspirit.com/discussion/11534/tierhive-19-locations-build-your-own-vps-plan-from-0-10-p-month-or-0-000135-per-hour) [docs](https://tierhive.com/blog/general/what-is-an-hourly-vps-and-why-you-might-want-one)
- **Snapshots and forks** (partly): Scheduled backups, paid storage. The panel offers scheduled and one-off backups plus snapshots, both billed by the gigabyte-hour, and a backup can be attached to a different VPS and mounted or chrooted instead of restored. That is the closest thing to a clone. What is missing is any memory snapshot or fork of a running machine, and the retention — how many backups are kept and for how long — is not published anywhere. [source](https://tierhive.com/) [docs](https://tierhive.com/blog/tierhive-howto/tierhive-backup-chroot)
- **Storage** (partly): 50 GB NVMe, 4 TB HDD. NVMe runs from 1 to 50 GB and HDD to 4,000 GB, but HDD is offered only in London, Singapore, Sydney and Vint Hill. Disks grow from the panel and the guest needs a reboot before the filesystem sees the new size; nothing says a disk can shrink. Backup and snapshot storage are separate, billed per GB-hour. A network-storage rate appears in the price feed with no documented product, so there is no honest claim of a detachable volume. [source](https://tierhive.com/api/pricing.php) [docs](https://tierhive.com/blog/tierhive-howto/extend-a-vps-disk)
- **Idle and waking** (yes): No idle stop. There is no idle timer, no automatic sleep and no session limit — the server runs until you stop or delete it, which is what a Discord gateway or an always-on agent needs. The trade is that idle hours bill like busy ones. The only automatic intervention is the CPU watchdog, which halves a core after two hours at 100%, and the only provider-side schedule is the backup one. [source](https://tierhive.com/blog/general/what-is-an-hourly-vps-and-why-you-might-want-one)
- **Reaching it** (partly): 2 TCP + 2 UDP ports. There is no public IPv4 of your own. Each server gets two forwarded TCP and two UDP ports on its host's address, and the first TCP port is always port 22, so SSH works with a standard client on a non-standard port. That leaves one TCP port for everything else — the provider's own HAProxy how-to uses a second VPS as a bastion to work around it. An IPv6 /64 per location, up to ten addresses per server, opens nearly all ports; the shared HAProxy does not serve IPv6. A noVNC console gets you in when SSH fails. [source](https://tierhive.com/blog/tierhive-howto/tierhive-vps-ports) [docs](https://tierhive.com/blog/tierhive-howto/tierhive-vps-ports)
- **Custom domains** (yes): HAProxy + Let's Encrypt. Domains and subdomains are added to the shared HAProxy in the control panel, with Let's Encrypt certificates issued and renewed automatically and load balancing or failover across backends in your private subnet. Two catches: the backend is a private IP in your own /24, and a domain left pointing at TierHive for more than 90 days after you close the account may be redirected by the provider. IPv6 is served directly, not through HAProxy. [source](https://tierhive.com/blog/general/haproxy) [docs](https://tierhive.com/blog/general/haproxy)
- **Outbound network** (partly): No per-GB fee, speed throttle. There is no egress price and no GB or TB allowance: bandwidth is a speed tier (Low 10, Medium 50, High 100 Mbit/s, capped per location at 50–300 Mbit/s) and a fair-use system that drops the cap by 10 Mbit/s for each hour at the limit, to a floor of 10 Mbit/s. Outgoing mail is blocked except through approved relays on port 587. The public IPv4 belongs to the host and is shared; a dedicated IPv6 is available. [source](https://tierhive.com/about.php) [docs](https://tierhive.com/about.php)
- **Keys and secrets** (no): No secret store. No secrets manager, no environment-variable store and no scoped API keys are documented. SSH keys are added at build time, and a recipe writes a deploy token to /opt/th-simple-token on the server, readable by anything running as root. An agent's model key therefore lives in a file the agent can read, as on any plain VPS. [source](https://tierhive.com/blog/tierhive-howto/tierhive-vps-ports)
- **Ways to drive it** (partly): Panel only; no API. Everything runs through a custom control panel: create, rebuild, resize, start and stop, map ports, allocate IPv6, schedule backups, add HAProxy domains, and open a noVNC console. No API reference, CLI, SDK or MCP server is published — the site's complete sitemap has no developer page and every panel path is behind the login. The only public JSON is the marketing calculator's rate feed and the recipe ticker, which are not a customer API. Recipes automate a first deploy; they are not an interface. [source](https://tierhive.com/blog/tierhive-howto/tierhive-vps-ports)
- **Built-in agents** (no): No agent recipes. The recipe marketplace is broad — Docker, LAMP, PostgreSQL, Caddy, Vaultwarden, Tailscale, WireGuard, Xray and around thirty more — but there is no Hermes, OpenClaw, Claude Code or Codex recipe, no prompt endpoint, no hosted browser and no managed desktop. The noVNC console is a view of your own machine. Agent setup is a terminal install like any other VPS. [source](https://tierhive.com/) [docs](https://tierhive.com/)
- **Teams and accounts** (not-published): Not published. The terms allow one account per customer and invite companies to ask about more, which suggests no team model. Sub-users, roles, SSO and an audit log are not described on any public page. What does exist is prepaid credit: you cannot spend more than the tokens you have bought, although nothing says what happens to a running server when the balance reaches zero. [source](https://tierhive.com/terms.php)
- **Billing models** (yes): $0.000135–$0.008373/h. A per-hour price built from published resource rates — RAM $0.0009216 per GiB-hour, NVMe $0.00002 per GB-hour — plus optional priority tiers. Prepaid tokens at $1 each, a $3 first top-up, a one-hour minimum per server, and no monthly price or cap. A stopped server is said to bill storage only, which is what makes part-time use cheap. The catch is the minimum: 1,000 ten-minute servers cost 1,000 hours. [source](https://tierhive.com/) [docs](https://tierhive.com/blog/general/what-is-an-hourly-vps-and-why-you-might-want-one)
- **Trials and free tiers** (partly): $0.01 credit, $3 top-up. A free account is created with a username and email, no card, and the price feed grants $0.01 of sign-up credit — about 74 hours on the smallest 128 MB server. The homepage also says a $3 minimum top-up is required to use the service, so whether that cent is spendable before you pay is unclear. There is no ongoing free VPS tier; the free static hosting is a separate product. A 14-day refund exists only if the service was barely used. [source](https://tierhive.com/) [docs](https://tierhive.com/refund.php)
- **The company** (partly): UK LTD, 2025, Alpha. Kernel Keepers LTD (16294246) was incorporated on 5 March 2025 at a Covent Garden address, and TierHive was announced on Hacker News on 8 January 2026. The status page shows per-location 90-day uptime, which read 99.91–100% on 2026-11-04. Against that: the acceptable-use policy declares Alpha status, says data loss can occur at any time, and states there is no SLA; no SOC 2 report, ISO 27001 certificate or data processing agreement is published, and headcount and funding are unknown. [source](https://tierhive.com/acceptable-use.php) [docs](https://tierhive.com/about.php)

## Capabilities

- Its own virtual machine: yes (KVM guest, own kernel) [source](https://tierhive.com/about.php)
- Root access: yes (Root) [source](https://tierhive.com/blog)
- Docker inside: yes (Docker recipes) [source](https://tierhive.com/)
- Nested virtualisation: yes (Passthrough + nesting) [source](https://tierhive.com/about.php)
- Your own image: yes (ISO from URL, PXE/iPXE) [source](https://lowendspirit.com/discussion/11534/tierhive-19-locations-build-your-own-vps-plan-from-0-10-p-month-or-0-000135-per-hour)
- Any size you like: partly (RAM/disk free, CPU fixed). RAM and disk are free-form sliders, but CPU is not a choice — one core up to 2 GB and two above that — so the machine is only half build-your-own. [source](https://tierhive.com/)
- Large machines: no (8 GiB / 2 vCPU max) [source](https://tierhive.com/)
- Resize while running: partly (Panel resize, reboot for disk). The panel changes RAM and disk while the server runs, but the guest only sees a bigger disk after a reboot, and vCPU cannot be changed at all. [source](https://tierhive.com/)
- GPUs: no (No GPU) [source](https://tierhive.com/api/pricing.php)
- Choose the region: yes (19 locations) [source](https://tierhive.com/api/pricing.php)
- Runs in the EU: yes (DE, FR ×3, NL, PL) [source](https://tierhive.com/api/pricing.php)
- Pause keeps memory: no (Stop = power off) [source](https://lowendspirit.com/discussion/11534/tierhive-19-locations-build-your-own-vps-plan-from-0-10-p-month-or-0-000135-per-hour)
- Pre-started pools: no (Created on demand) [source](https://tierhive.com/)
- Starts in under a second: no (Under 60 s) [source](https://tierhive.com/)
- Snapshots of files: yes (Backups + snapshots) [source](https://tierhive.com/)
- Snapshots with memory: no (Disk only) [source](https://tierhive.com/blog/tierhive-howto/tierhive-backup-chroot)
- Copy a running machine: no (Cold restore only) [source](https://tierhive.com/blog/tierhive-howto/tierhive-backup-chroot)
- Pick an older snapshot: not-published (Retention unknown) [source](https://lowendspirit.com/discussion/11534/tierhive-19-locations-build-your-own-vps-plan-from-0-10-p-month-or-0-000135-per-hour)
- Reusable templates: partly (OS images + recipes). You can rebuild from the OS list or run a community recipe, but a configured server cannot be saved as your own template. [source](https://tierhive.com/)
- Automatic backups: yes (Scheduled, billed storage) [source](https://tierhive.com/)
- Files survive a stop: yes (Disk kept, storage billed) [source](https://lowendspirit.com/discussion/11534/tierhive-19-locations-build-your-own-vps-plan-from-0-10-p-month-or-0-000135-per-hour)
- Separate volumes: not-published (No volume product) [source](https://tierhive.com/api/pricing.php)
- One volume, several machines: no (One disk per server) [source](https://tierhive.com/)
- Mount outside storage: no (No object storage) [source](https://tierhive.com/static-hosting)
- Large disk: yes (4,000 GB HDD) [source](https://tierhive.com/api/pricing.php)
- Can stay on indefinitely: yes (No idle stop) [source](https://tierhive.com/blog/general/what-is-an-hourly-vps-and-why-you-might-want-one)
- Choose the idle timeout: no (No idle timer) [source](https://tierhive.com/blog/general/what-is-an-hourly-vps-and-why-you-might-want-one)
- Wakes on a request: no (Never sleeps) [source](https://tierhive.com/blog/general/what-is-an-hourly-vps-and-why-you-might-want-one)
- Scheduled runs: no (Cron in the guest) [source](https://lowendspirit.com/discussion/11534/tierhive-19-locations-build-your-own-vps-plan-from-0-10-p-month-or-0-000135-per-hour)
- Public link to a port: yes (HAProxy domain + TLS) [source](https://tierhive.com/acceptable-use.php)
- Private link: no (No private link) [source](https://tierhive.com/about.php)
- Real SSH: yes (SSH on a forwarded port) [source](https://tierhive.com/blog/tierhive-howto/tierhive-vps-ports)
- Terminal in the browser: yes (noVNC console) [source](https://tierhive.com/)
- Tunnel to your computer: no (No provider tunnel) [source](https://tierhive.com/)
- Non-web ports: partly (1 spare TCP + 2 UDP). Each server gets two forwarded TCP ports and SSH takes one, so only one TCP service is reachable from outside unless you use IPv6. [source](https://tierhive.com/blog/tierhive-howto/tierhive-vps-ports)
- Your own domain: yes (HAProxy or AAAA) [source](https://tierhive.com/blog/general/haproxy)
- Automatic HTTPS: yes (Let's Encrypt, auto-renewed) [source](https://tierhive.com/blog/general/haproxy)
- Outbound data included: yes (No per-GB charge) [source](https://tierhive.com/about.php)
- Allow only some sites: not-published (No firewall documented) [source](https://tierhive.com/about.php)
- Turn the internet off: not-published (No off switch) [source](https://tierhive.com/)
- Fixed outgoing IP: partly (Shared IPv4, own IPv6). Outbound IPv4 leaves from the host's address, shared with every other server on that machine; only the IPv6 addresses are yours. [source](https://tierhive.com/blog/tierhive-howto/tierhive-vps-ports)
- Stored secrets: no (None) [source](https://tierhive.com/blog/tierhive-howto/tierhive-vps-ports)
- Secrets the agent cannot read: no (Root reads everything) [source](https://tierhive.com/blog/tierhive-howto/tierhive-vps-ports)
- Limited API keys: not-published (No API keys documented) [source](https://tierhive.com/blog/tierhive-howto/tierhive-vps-ports)
- Create from the website: yes (Custom control panel) [source](https://tierhive.com/)
- Command-line tool: no (No CLI) [source](https://tierhive.com/blog/tierhive-howto/tierhive-vps-ports)
- Python SDK: no (No SDK) [source](https://tierhive.com/blog/tierhive-howto/tierhive-vps-ports)
- TypeScript SDK: no (No SDK) [source](https://tierhive.com/blog/tierhive-howto/tierhive-vps-ports)
- Documented HTTP API: no (No documented API) [source](https://tierhive.com/blog/tierhive-howto/tierhive-vps-ports)
- MCP server: no (No MCP server) [source](https://tierhive.com/blog/tierhive-howto/tierhive-vps-ports)
- Interactive terminal over the API: no (SSH or noVNC only) [source](https://tierhive.com/)
- Files over the API: no (SSH/SFTP only) [source](https://tierhive.com/blog/tierhive-howto/tierhive-backup-chroot)
- Coding agents preinstalled: no (None) [source](https://tierhive.com/)
- Send it a prompt: no (None) [source](https://tierhive.com/)
- One-click Hermes: no (No Hermes recipe) [source](https://tierhive.com/)
- One-click OpenClaw: no (No OpenClaw recipe) [source](https://tierhive.com/)
- Browser built in: no (None) [source](https://tierhive.com/)
- Desktop for computer use: no (DIY only) [source](https://tierhive.com/blog)
- Runs other platforms' agents: no (None) [source](https://tierhive.com/about.php)
- Team workspace: not-published (One account) [source](https://tierhive.com/terms.php)
- Roles and permissions: not-published (Not published) [source](https://tierhive.com/terms.php)
- Single sign-on: not-published (Password + 6-digit code) [source](https://control.tierhive.com/login)
- Hard spending cap: partly (Prepaid tokens). Spending is limited by the prepaid token balance rather than a limit you set, and nothing says what happens to a running server when the balance reaches zero. [source](https://tierhive.com/)
- Usage alerts: not-published (Not published) [source](https://tierhive.com/)
- Audit log: not-published (Not published) [source](https://tierhive.com/acceptable-use.php)
- Billed per second: no (Hourly, 1-hour minimum) [source](https://lowendspirit.com/discussion/11534/tierhive-19-locations-build-your-own-vps-plan-from-0-10-p-month-or-0-000135-per-hour)
- CPU billed only while working: no (Bundled with RAM) [source](https://tierhive.com/about.php)
- Paused costs only storage: yes (Storage only while off) [source](https://lowendspirit.com/discussion/11534/tierhive-19-locations-build-your-own-vps-plan-from-0-10-p-month-or-0-000135-per-hour)
- No monthly fee: yes (No plan fee) [source](https://tierhive.com/)
- Flat monthly price: no (Hourly only) [source](https://tierhive.com/)
- Ongoing free tier: no (None) [source](https://tierhive.com/)
- Free starting credit: yes ($0.01 at signup) [source](https://tierhive.com/api/pricing.php)
- Try without a card: yes (No card to register) [source](https://tierhive.com/)
- Public status page: yes (Per-location 90-day uptime) [source](https://tierhive.com/status)
- Uptime promise (SLA): no (None) [source](https://tierhive.com/acceptable-use.php)
- SOC 2 report: not-published (Not published) [source](https://tierhive.com/acceptable-use.php)
- Data processing agreement: not-published (No DPA) [source](https://tierhive.com/privacy.php)
- Open source or self-hostable: no (Closed platform) [source](https://tierhive.com/)

## Usability

- Dashboard: A custom control panel behind a login: create and rebuild servers, change RAM and disk, start and stop, map ports on the Subnet Config page, allocate IPv6, schedule backups and snapshots, add domains to HAProxy, and open a noVNC console.
- Without code: No. Creating a server is click-through and there are one-click recipes for Docker, WordPress, WireGuard and similar, but the recipes end at a console, ports are mapped by hand, and the HAProxy backend is your own private IP. Nothing here sets up an AI agent for you.
- Signup: A username, email and password, then a six-digit code at every sign-in. No card is needed to register; the first tokens are bought through FastSpring with a $3 minimum. The terms forbid disposable email addresses and VPN sign-up, although the About page says the opposite.
- Docs: Thin and blog-shaped: an About page, the acceptable-use policy, and 18 blog posts of which about a dozen are how-tos (finding your ports, HAProxy, IPv6, growing a disk, chrooting a backup). There is no knowledge base, no FAQ and no API reference.
- Trips people up: There is no public IPv4 of your own: SSH arrives on a random high port of a shared address, and you get two forwarded TCP ports in total, one of which SSH already uses.
- Trips people up: vCPU is not selectable. A 2 GB server has one core and anything larger has two, so a four-core machine cannot be bought at any price.
- Trips people up: The one-hour minimum is charged per server, so a fleet of short-lived servers costs far more than the same work on one long-lived box.
- Trips people up: The blog's hourly prices are stale: it quotes a Popular tier at $0.004061/h, which matches no current size.
- Trips people up: Scraping needs written permission before you start, and bulk or transactional email is banned outright.
- Trips people up: A stopped server is a power-off: nothing keeps running, and whether the stopped hours really bill storage only is stated in forum offers rather than on the site.
- Trips people up: The service is in Alpha, with data loss and no SLA written into its own policy.

## Company

- Legal entity: Kernel Keepers LTD, company number 16294246, a private limited company in England and Wales. [source](https://kernelkeepers.com)
- Registered office: 71-75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9JQ, United Kingdom. [source](https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/16294246)
- Incorporated: 5 March 2025 — the company is about twenty months old. [source](https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/16294246)
- First public launch: A Show HN on 8 January 2026; the service has been publicly available for about ten months. [source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46544004)
- Uptime promise: None. The acceptable-use policy says there is no SLA and that data loss can occur at any time. [source](https://tierhive.com/acceptable-use.php)
- Status page: Per-location 90-day uptime, reading 99.99% in Amsterdam, London and Singapore, 99.91% in Tokyo and 100% in the other fifteen locations on 2026-11-04. [source](https://tierhive.com/status)
- Who takes the payment: FastSpring is the merchant of record, so FastSpring is the seller on the invoice rather than Kernel Keepers. [source](https://tierhive.com/terms.php)

## Caveats

- **Alpha, with data loss written into the policy** (open): The acceptable-use policy states that TierHive is in Alpha, that data loss can occur at any time without warning, that backups are the customer's sole responsibility and that those backups may also be lost. It tells customers not to use the service for production or critical data. The About page adds that if data is lost you get a fresh, blank server, not a recovery.
- **Storage-only billing while stopped is not on the provider's website** (open): The operator's forum offers say a powered-off server bills only storage, and the pricing feed has no separate stopped rate. Nothing on tierhive.com describes the stopped state, so the card bills the NVMe rate for stopped hours and treats the rest as zero. If stopped hours billed at the running rate, C would rise from $0.62 to $2.98 (730 h × $0.0040864).
- **MB and GB look binary, not decimal** (open): The site calls the largest machine 8 GB while the price feed calls the same ceiling 8,192 MB, so its MB and GB are binary and its per-GB-hour disk rate maps 1:1 to this site's GiB. For RAM that is direct; for disk it is an inference, because no page defines the unit in bytes. If the disk GB is decimal, every disk charge is 7.37% higher — A $3.90, B $6.17, C $0.65 — and a 50 GiB disk would sit above the 50 GB ceiling.
- **Two forwarded TCP ports, and SSH takes one of them** (open): Every server gets two TCP and two UDP ports on the public address of its host, and the first TCP port is always mapped to port 22. That leaves one spare TCP port for anything else, which is why the provider's own HAProxy how-to uses a second VPS as a bastion. An IPv6 /64 per location, up to ten addresses per server, is the way around it — but the shared HAProxy does not serve IPv6.
- **Free trial and a $3 minimum top-up are both advertised** (contradiction): The homepage says a $3 minimum top-up is required after registration to use the service; the blog says to start with the free trial and no credit card; the price feed grants $0.01 of sign-up credit; the forum offers promise free tokens to try before buying. The honest reading is a free account with one cent of credit that may not be usable until $3 is added.
- **The terms ban what the About page invites** (contradiction): The terms forbid disposable email addresses and signing up over a VPN or proxy; the About page says the operator has no objection to a free or disposable email or a VPN. The terms also describe monthly or annual subscriptions, which is boilerplate from the company's other products — the actual product is prepaid hourly tokens.
- **A Sao Paulo location sits next to a ban on Brazilian customers** (contradiction): The price feed lists Sao Paulo with a 4,096 MB ceiling, while the terms say the service cannot be provided to customers in Brazil (along with China, Russia, Vietnam and Iran). The node is real; customers located in Brazil are refused.
- **The marketing blog quotes prices that no longer exist** (open): The hourly-VPS explainer quotes a Popular tier at $0.004061/h, which reproduces from no current size, while the homepage's Popular card is $0.007561/h. Its Standard figure, $0.002343/h, still matches. No rate in this package comes from the blog.
- **No documented API, CLI or SDK** (open): The site's sitemap lists every public page and there is no developer, API or CLI page; every guessed panel path returns 401 behind the login. The only public JSON endpoints are the marketing calculator's rate feed and the recipe ticker. A third-party dossier reaches the same conclusion. Nothing here says an API will never exist — only that none is documented today.
- **Shared CPU with a watchdog and a fair-use network throttle** (open): The provider warns that CPU is the most contended resource, that steal will be higher than on an enterprise host, and that a server averaging a full core for two hours is limited to half a core until it reboots. Network speed is a tier (50 to 300 Mbit/s by location) that steps down by 10 Mbit/s an hour under sustained use, to a floor of 10 Mbit/s. Neither binds at the loads in A, B and C.
- **No SOC 2 report or data processing agreement is published** (open): The legal pages are terms, privacy, refunds and acceptable use. There is no DPA, no sub-processor list and no audit report. The company is UK-based; its EU locations are in Germany, France, the Netherlands and Poland. A buyer who needs GDPR paperwork should ask before buying.

## Sources

- [Homepage: calculator, cards, features, recipes](https://tierhive.com/)
- [Calculator rate feed (RAM, disk, tiers, DHCP, backups, locations)](https://tierhive.com/api/pricing.php)
- [About TierHive: CPU rule, nesting, network tiers, fair use](https://tierhive.com/about.php)
- [Acceptable use: Alpha status, data loss, no SLA, scraping, email](https://tierhive.com/acceptable-use.php)
- [Terms of service: entity, countries, payments](https://tierhive.com/terms.php)
- [Refund policy](https://tierhive.com/refund.php)
- [Status page: per-location 90-day uptime](https://tierhive.com/status)
- [Free static hosting (separate product)](https://tierhive.com/static-hosting)
- [How to find your forwarded ports](https://tierhive.com/blog/tierhive-howto/tierhive-vps-ports)
- [HAProxy and Let's Encrypt with a TierHive VPS](https://tierhive.com/blog/general/haproxy)
- [Configuring IPv6](https://tierhive.com/blog/technical_articles/configuring-ipv6)
- [Growing a disk](https://tierhive.com/blog/tierhive-howto/extend-a-vps-disk)
- [Chrooting a backup](https://tierhive.com/blog/tierhive-howto/tierhive-backup-chroot)
- [What an hourly VPS is (older prices)](https://tierhive.com/blog/general/what-is-an-hourly-vps-and-why-you-might-want-one)
- [Show HN launch, 8 January 2026](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46544004)
- [Operator offer post: stopped billing, one-hour minimum](https://lowendspirit.com/discussion/11534/tierhive-19-locations-build-your-own-vps-plan-from-0-10-p-month-or-0-000135-per-hour)
- [Kernel Keepers: company number and address](https://kernelkeepers.com)
- [Companies House record](https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/16294246)