The only possible answer is: "It depends". I spent way too much time than I can account for on the command line of colocated machines. It's a great learning ex

The only possible answer is: "It depends". I spent way too much time than I can account for on the command line of colocated machines. It's a great learning experience, but you're really on your own. There's nothing teaching you that as much as exposure to a real server. I'll never forget the experience of just also installing asterisk via apt-get back then because it seemed fun, then forgetting it and a year later getting some call from the abuse department because my server did weird things. Logging in, seeing strange processes and not knowing any better than to nuke it from orbit and losing two of my customers' websites without recent backup. I wouldn't take a vanilla colocated VM these days over any solid cloud provider, but then again everything that I've learned about WHY I wouldn't do that and the internals of linux came from tinkering. Maybe it's because I'm spoiled by magically working loadbalancers, reliable DNS, live migration of failed machines. Maybe it's because I just feel too old to call people for failed hard disks or I'm on call for a 40 million user webpage. So sure, if you don't have much to lose or your load is _extremely_ compute and traffic sensitive, go ahead — it's a great way to get started. If your goal is to build the next Facebook there though, do yourself a favor and start on a reliable cloud provider. The massive difference in pricing exists for _something_ — mainly for you to stop worrying and work on your core product instead. Which is good: Opportunity cost is real.