We are looking at running on lxd for our hosting needs and were wondering if others know of a lxd friendly hosting provider.
our needs are fairly simple. We are looking to host a few mail servers and webservers as well as the associated database instances.
Thanks in advance.
My favorite platform for running LXD are the Hetzner cloud servers. You can rent them by the hour, and thus easily experiment with installing LXD on them several times for pennies at a time. There is a well-documented procedure that you can use to repartition them so that you can create a ZFS partition for use with LXD. I typically leave 6GB for the root partition and use the rest for ZFS. I believe the best deal are the new ARM64 servers (CAX series) because they offer twice the memory for about the same price as the amd64 servers, but they are only available in Germany so far. Repartitioning and installing ZFS takes several minutes, but once you do it once, you can take a snapshot which you can then use to create zfs-ready servers faster. If you use snapshots this way, it’s easier to use the same size server as the snapshot. You can get started without repartitioning, by attaching a separate block storage volume, which you can partition for ZFS.
If you move up to dedicated servers or even colocation, as you mentioned, then I don’t know what lxd-friendly means. I think the important thing in all cases is to be able to repartition the disks. In the case of dedicated servers with two disks, I remove the default software RAID in the partitions that I use for ZFS, so that ZFS handles the disk mirroring.