12 ms·

I don't need a VPS anymore

213 points by jaza 5y ago

smbv 5y ago
Cool blog, is there an RSS feed available anywhere?
- boonscrolling 5y ago
  https://greenash.net.au/rss/ https://greenash.net.au/rss/
mjevans 5y ago
There are still reasons to have a VPS. However nearly all of them are driven by one factor for me: American ISPs suck; cash from the wallets and otherwise. For one thing, they often make it against the ToS to host 'a server' (generally). ISPs with even remotely decent uploads, EVEN for their business offerings, in the metro area around Seattle (still crazy rent, can't even afford to try buying a house) are like CableCo for 1000mbit down 35mbit up for too much a month or DSL for (I am not joking) 7mbit down (if your connection is GOOD) and (LESS THAN) 1mbit up. At least for CableCo they also have far too many outages for long periods. I strongly suspect 50%+ of what I pay goes to someone's profit instead of even a tiny bit of (maybe not 100% speed) redundancy and ways of performing maintenance that aren't several hours overnight.
- selectronics 5y ago
  >For one thing, they often make it against the ToS to host 'a server' (generally). Beyond this, it can also be impossible due to lack of a static IP or control over the router (5G internet service with CGNAT). A VPS with WireGuard and remote port forwarding allows access for things like SSH.
  - ixwt 5y ago
    Many DNS providers allow you to curl a particular URL to set the IP address for your domain. Set your server to curl it periodically, and it solves the lack of a static IP.
    - harry8 5y ago
      No good if your isp provided IP is behind an ISP nat. Eg via 3/4/5g Dongle. VPS can get you past that in a few ways.
  - treesknees 5y ago
    Alternatively, CloudFlare Tunnel can do this for free without the need for a VPS (assuming you're serving HTTP traffic only.)
- dannywarner 5y ago
  The post recommends SaaS / IaaS in place of VPS. "It's 2022, and I'm here to tell you, that deploying stuff online purely using SaaS / IaaS offerings is an option, and it's often the quickest, the cheapest, and the best-quality option (although can't you only ever pick two of those? hahaha), and it quite possibly should be your go-to option."
  - eek2121 5y ago
    For me, the solution is Cloudflare + (pick 2) random cloud providers + a sanity check for failover or bypass of Cloudflare if something really messes up. I run a custom stack on 90% of my sites, so it isn't feasible to use SaaS / IaaS.
    - Dracophoenix 5y ago
      What's your stack?
- fergbrain 5y ago
  Ziply Fiber has been great and I get 1gb symmetric for $80/month with no data cap. My homelab has never been happier!
- toast0 5y ago
  I'm in the metro area around Seattle (across the sound), and my CenturyLink bonded pair syncs at 92M/15M (it was 87M/11M but it mysteriously changed last November; pricing tier is 80M/unspecified). Although there are a lot of places where the speeds are what you quoted, if they'll install for you at all. It always shocks people when I quote my speeds though... but Comcast won't service my property even though they service my neighbors and are on the poll. My county's PUD has a reasonable fiber program, but the install costs are too high / too much hassle because I'd need to trench down a long driveway to the street. Anyway, the speeds are OK, but PPPoE is terrible (and I hear they run PPPoE over fiber around here too), and at least my Remote Terminal has no battery, only utility power and utility power on this side of the sound doesn't have a lot of nines. I've got a LTE hotspot to failover to, but the cell towers get iffy when the utility power goes out too. Anyway, I feel your pain. I run servers in my house, but I have to run a VPS for my 'important' stuff.
  - btgeekboy 5y ago
    > I hear they run PPPoE over fiber around here too Yeah, the old CenturyLink fiber installs have PPPoE. New installs under the Quantum brand are plain DHCP, but still on VLAN 201. (Perhaps to discourage people from accidentally plugging in their router wrong? Not sure.)
- swiftcoder 5y ago
  > ISPs with even remotely decent uploads, EVEN for their business offerings, in the metro area around Seattle (still crazy rent, can't even afford to try buying a house) are like CableCo for 1000mbit down 35mbit up for too much a month or DSL for (I am not joking) 7mbit down (if your connection is GOOD) and (LESS THAN) 1mbit up. There are residential ISPs offering symmetrical gigabit fiber in a pretty good chunk of metro Seattle. I lived in an apartment tower so had access to Wave-G (previously CondoNet)'s insanely good gigabit offering, but friends who rented houses in the suburbs also had residential fiber.
  - rhizome 5y ago
    Will they sell you static IPs?
    - swiftcoder 5y ago
      Depends on the provider, but it's not that bad to use a dynamic DNS service for those that don't (or something like a CloudFlare tunnel).
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  Have these anti-server ToS clauses ever been enforced? To me it seems like a “cover your ass” clause they put in there to be able to disconnect people who put undue stress on a shitty oversubscribed asymmetric network by hosting a very popular and heavy website, or if they notice a large business website being hosted and need an excuse to force the company to upgrade to a business-grade plan. It does not necessarily mean they’ll enforce it religiously without a good technical & financial justification. As long as your overall usage remains within the bounds of a typical home user, you’ll be fine. Keep in mind that nowadays home users use a ton of upload bandwidth for things like cloud storage/backups and don’t get cut off even if they saturate the pipe for hours, so you have a pretty wide margin to play with. Torrenting and P2P also use upload heavily and have been around for decades without many horror stories that I know of (the main problem with torrents is copyright infringement and not bandwidth usage). A self-hosted personal website or some apps (Nextcloud, etc) for personal usage will be a drop in the bucket compared to the above.
  - gruez 5y ago
    > Have these anti-server ToS clauses ever been enforced? AFAIK some ISPs block common ports (eg. 80/443). That sounds like "enforced" to me.
cheschire 5y ago
Was there a typo in the final paragraph and the author meant SaaS / PaaS? Isn’t a VPS an IaaS offering? Edit: The author wrote “SaaS / IaaS” in the final paragraph.
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  SaaS in this context means pretty much the same thing but there isn't always a need to differentiate between them when it comes to buzzwords.
- nine_k 5y ago
  The author went from.a VPS, a VM he managed manually, to hosting everything on Netlify and GitHub, with a smattering of AWS. Thus the title. The author duly notes that a VPS does not belong to you in ways similar to those SaaS offering don't, so why bother. If all you used a VPS for was hosting public static web pages, then there's indeed little point to run a VPS by hand.
hprotagonist 5y ago
99% of what i use a VPS for is as a reverse proxy / tunnel, or as an IRC gateway. There's no SaaSing those in a way that scratches my itches.
- neurostimulant 5y ago
  Well, there is Cloudflare Tunnel if you need to expose something (ssh, database, http services, etc) to the internet without maintaining a vps to act as a tunnel/reverse proxy yourself.
encryptluks2 5y ago
It sounds like you never really needed a VPS, that you could have just paid some shared hosting provider $10 a year to host your site and been fine, but instead you chose to do so and now somehow came to the realization that you never needed to do so. Cool story, but then you throw in a bunch of stuff like about how SaaS is hard to compete against but simply because you never had a reason for a VPS in the first place. Once you calculate things like bandwidth, then SaaS is not hard to compete against... so if you need to upload 20TB+ a month with a 10GB uplink, then certain VPS providers make perfect sense cause you'd end up paying 1000+k dollars per month to do the same through some cloud SaaS solution.
- rstuart4133 5y ago
  +1 The things he has moved to SaaS sounds like it's, simple, public low volume stuff. My only concern is what happens if the free provider just disappears, but reading between the lines it sounds he's got that covered. His web site is in git, he has a local copy of his git repositories and he backs it up to S3. Personally I've always used SaaS for stuff like that. Much harder is personal private stuff like email / contacts / calendar / photos. Stuff you want kept private, you don't want to loose ever and must be online 24/7. In utopia the back end would be redundant store with copies stored at multiple vendors, so you don't care if one dies. And the front end is yet another SaaS provider that uses the back ends. If they disappear you just move to another one, pointing them to your back ends. In the real world you use Google or a competitor to do all jobs, they make it hard to export / import your data to other providers, they mine your data, they will make it available to governments and law enforcement agencies and possibly lawyers on request without telling you, and if they get the shits with you it disappears and you loose everything. In todays world that what SaaS delivers to most people, and it's reads like a deal with the devil.
  - jaza 5y ago
    Author here. That's right, I'd like to think I do have it pretty well covered, if the free provider just disappears. They're static sites, they can be hosted anywhere. I have almost no lock-in (except for a few config files, and function hooks, that could be ported fairly easily). If one provider pulls the rug out from under me, I can move to another one. In the worst case scenario, if all the providers stop offering free static hosting, I could just move all my www hosting back to a VPS (although I'd probably move it to S3 + CloudFront + Lambda, which isn't free, but is so cheap for low-volume that it might as well be free). Yes, I agree, personal private stuff is harder. Before embarking on this static-site endeavour, I migrated my photos from Flickr to S3 / CloudFront, and that was a big project in itself (and Flickr is one of the nicer SaaS'es, that lets you export your data quite easily). For email / contacts / calendar, I'm pretty locked in (with one of the big providers), I wouldn't mind moving to a better setup where I own and I control the data, but honestly, it's in my too hard basket.
lrvick 5y ago
I feel the author presents a false dichotomy. I would argue that production servers should be immutable appliances. They should not have mutable root file-systems, they should not have package managers, they should not have ssh or require direct modification. Those are security accidents waiting to happen. I do not babysit my servers in my home rack. I have a company to run and better things to do just like the author, but that is no reason to give up freedom, privacy, and security. I like my servers to be as reliable and low maintenance as a refrigerator. They are not pets or a garden. Try container optimized appliance operating systems like Talos OS or application specific firmware-like images like Homeassistant provides and you can generally set up services with automatic updates and forget about them for extended periods of time, knowing they will auto-rollback and notify you if manual intervention is ever required. If they fully fail you can just restore a new stack in minutes from a git commit and your last backup.
- edgyquant 5y ago
  Interesting. Are there any OS’ that implement such a structure? Sounds kind of like chromeos if it was geared towards servers.
  - jleedev 5y ago
    Container Optimized OS is quite literally “We let the Chromium OS folks make a server OS.” https://cloud.google.com/container-optimized-os/ https://cloud.google.com/container-optimized-os/
  - politician 5y ago
    Nix?
    - edgyquant 5y ago
      I don’t think nix has an immutable filesystem, servers etc. Im sure you could build an imagine like that but you could do that with any distro.
      - 5y ago
bluedino 5y ago
Still have mine. $5/month, have all kinds of useful tools running on it. Can't get rate limited by my own IP checker. But I don't use IRC anymore really :(
dataminded 5y ago
Maybe next decade. I really like my various VPS.
esjeon 5y ago
I think OP is overgeneralizing a little. Cloud is all about buying resources(IaaS) and functions(SaaS) of your choice. That means, one can purchase storage and traffic like the case here, or CPU time and memory for data processing. One specific scenario can work for someone, but that doesn't define what cloud is or should be, because it's all about choice.
cutler 5y ago
Fine if you can make do with static sites but that's hardly a common use case. Most of us who use a VPS are hosting Nginx with a reverse proxy to Rails, Django, Express or Laravel + PostgreSQL or MySQL where the memory costs are a fraction of the equivalent cloud offering. I tried Github pages once, rather than Netlify, and pulled my hair out trying to get HTTPS working with a personal domain. Last I checked it's still not possible.
- jaza 5y ago
  Author here. A big part of why I'm saying "I don't need a VPS anymore", is because I'm also saying "I don't need dynamic sites anymore". I've been building dynamic sites for two decades (once upon a time "original LAMP stack" PHP + MySQL, more recently Python + PostgreSQL). I honestly never imagined that static sites could one day compete with that. But times have changed, and the JAMstack of 2022 has all the functionality you need. I've managed to convert all my old dynamic sites to be statically generated, without really compromising on bells and whistles. And the SaaS I'm now using is (almost) all free. As far as I'm concerned, I'm having my cake and eating it too.
  - cutler 5y ago
    I think you're overplaying the "static" card. If you're using the JAMstack the static bit is only half of the equation. Need a contact form? Now you need a form-processing service and it's no longer static. If you're replacing old PHP + MySQL sites you'll need a lot more than a static site generator. "Mostly static" might be more accurate but then how long does that last? Clients typically want WordPress plus a ton of plugins. I don't see how JAMstack addresses that need. You say it's nearly 100% free but I just looked at Netlify's free tier and you're only allowed 100 form submissions per month after which they're $19 each. I don't think I would get a night's sleep with that hanging over my head.
    - jaza 5y ago
      It's up to you when you think a traditional server back-end is still warranted, there are certainly still cases where it makes sense. But if all you need is a contact form, then I'd argue that it doesn't make sense! Yes, I agree, Netlify Forms is a rip-off, if you need more than the free limit of 100 submissions per month (which personally I don't, but of course many people do). But there are many other options for simple form handling, I'd recommend looking into them. And the JAMstack can compete quite well with WordPress and co these days, check out https://myclientwants.com/ https://myclientwants.com/
habibur 5y ago
I see it like this : Once there were a lot of free tera byte image hosting services. And then after some market ups and downs, most of them either closed down, asked for subscription fee or hugely restricted what can be done. Free static hosting services might not remain such for long. At the very least, they might introduce terms or condition you might not like. Then it will be harder for you to shift to another service, compared to switching your VPS server. Also I count my time spent on managing the servers as free. For me it's experimenting what else can be done, gaining experience and overall enjoyable time spent. That might not be true for everyone.
- jtbayly 5y ago
  > Then it will be harder for you to shift to another service, compared to switching your VPS server. No way. I can move a folder of files to anywhere quite confidently. Even a VPS. But I have no idea what I would do if I needed to move my VPS. I’d probably have to start over from scratch.
  - tasuki 5y ago
    If your VPS was build by hand over a long period of time, sure it's hard to switch to another service. If your VPS setup is automated by Ansible or NixOS or something, it ceases to be hard.
    - jtbayly 5y ago
      Really? And how does Ansible get the data from my old VPS?
- Tehchops 5y ago
  Sites hosted on Netlify literally just depend on a github repo with a TOML configuration file at the root. For basic static sites, which I imagine fit the needs of the majority of personal hosting, it's incredibly trivial to point the same repo at a different static hosting platform.
  - 5y ago
vmception 5y ago
A long hold out! Works for most use cases. If you are doing any big data processing that doesn't neatly fit in a predefined resource plan then you are still doing all the SSHing etc. You might even be buying your own physical beefy computer to throw in the closet and SSH into from elsewhere. I wonder how long the likes of Netlify and Vercel will last though, before they too introduce onerous conditions.
mario_kart_snes 5y ago
IS this an ad for Netlify?
- jaza 5y ago
  Author here. Yes, I'm singing Netlify's praises, but there are plenty of alternatives - GitHub Pages, Vercel, Cloudflare Pages, to name a few - that are just as good. And it's a funny kind of "ad", when you consider that I'm paying $0 for my Netlify account, and I'm making it pretty clear that most other people should be able to use it for free too.
est 5y ago
You still need a VPS if you want to serve non-www traffic.
- copperx 5y ago
  Agreed. We need a Netlify for Gemini.
  - MatthiasPortzel 5y ago
    Sourcehut pages offers Gemini capsule hosting. Edit: Sourcehut pages is the most direct parallel to Github pages but there's a bunch more options for free hosting listed on gemini://geminiquickst.art/ And that's not even mentioning the number of Tilde's that are configured to let you host Gemini content.
mac-chaffee 5y ago
I think people forget that unavailability can be caused by non-technical things like changing terms of service. It's easy to recognize that you shouldn't run something critical on a piece of software considered "beta", but too many people happily seek the loss-leading free tier of cloud providers. If your service is essentially losing money for the company hosting it, that's not a good place to be. Still trying to convince my company to stop using the Dockerhub free tier after they pulled the rug out once already...
api 5y ago
We will never see a renaissance in self-hosting unless administration can be made orders of magnitude easier.
paxys 5y ago
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe” - Carl Sagan The same can be said for self-hosting. Everyone trusts some other person or company at some level in the stack. It's all about balancing the tradeoffs and finding a sweet spot that works for you. Too many people miss the forest for the trees – the important thing is to create and get your work out there, not endlessly argue about what sized hammer to use.
- willis936 5y ago
  No one never needs to trust copper wires or single transistors. One could, in theory, build an entire computer from discrete components and never have to trust external hardware or software. Of course, it wouldn't be very practically useful and would be a monumental amount of effort. But hey, it's a cozy thought for those chasing the trust dragon.
  - nkrisc 5y ago
    I think in this context building a computer from individual transistors and copper wire is the same as “invent the universe” for the purposes of the expression.
    - dTal 5y ago
      Or baking an apple pie, to feed your electronics engineer? If you're going to carry it to its logical conclusion, "invent the universe" works in any context.
  - shkkmo 5y ago
    AFAIK, we don't currently have the ability to compile any of our software from scratch. Every compilation utilizes digital artifacts that were created externally. To operate a "no trust computer", not only would you have to build the hardware for scratch, but you would also have to recreate more than a half century of collaborative advancements in computer science. This isn't a cozy thought for those "chasing the trust dragon" since it means that a true "no trust computer" is impossible to create for any single individual and even practically impossible for any group operating on a timescale of less than decades.
venkat223 5y ago
Self hosting VPS and SaaS are fighting to market their products.Whither net expansion?
freedomben 5y ago
When reading posts like this I often think, why do so many people not use Ansible (or an equivalent) for running these updates? It's really easy to get a simple start. You can do one thing at a time. For a while I had only an inventory file and a small play that ran updates. With a single command I can make sure updates are installed on all the machines.
- jaza 5y ago
  Author here. As I think I explained pretty thoroughly in the article, regularly running system updates is only the tip of the iceberg.
trey-jones 5y ago
I might need some perspective. Every time I read one of these I'm just shaking my head, and yes the arguments are Less Power, Less Control, but also SysAdmin is me. That is my identity, and the part of the job that I like the most. I solve problems with configuration before code. So I hate to think that I'm becoming obsolete, of course. I also don't think that I am, because I do think that my way has some clear and definite advantages over eg. Netlify. I also think that "my site is free as in beer and also lightning fast" generally transposes to "my site doesn't have any traffic". Am I deluded? I recognize that I have a clear bias, but even stepping back, I do think that even if some don't need a VPS (or server) anymore, that there is still room for my ilk in the tech world.
- ldoughty 5y ago
  I was a junior system administrator... And became an early cloud adopter... I think your viewing is valid, but yes, biased by your knowledge. Since you already know system administration, it's not hard for you to manage another system... That's your day job, what's a personal one? But for people who prefer code, handing that off is a blessing. I runs small light sail vps.. it took me only a few hours to write up scripts to manage containers.. and a few more hours to automate backups to a secure location in another AWS account... But for today years, what I just described is impossible, or a 1-2 week task.. not an afternoon... And this is our bias... For us, it's easier than learning lambda, or api gateway... But for them, those are easier than learning system administration. I also disagree with the idea we are becoming obsolete... I work in a serverless DevOps environment for 4+ years and still explain basic networking concepts regularly... Stuff that don't teach much of in computer science... Like failover DNS ... While managing DNS was moved to the cloud, many still don't understand the technical reasonings of things.
- vmception 5y ago
  > I also think that "my site is free as in beer and also lightning fast" generally transposes to "my site doesn't have any traffic" its more about being able to handle spurts of traffic and sustained traffic. these services are good enough to power whole communities and mobile apps. and that means it covers most use cases, as well as the placeholder websites that may launch a product once. and by most use cases, we're talking about just the 99th percentile of high load intertwined ratsnest products not being able to handle it, but even then that's only because of an insanely high traffic load that is loading unique queries that are impossible to cache and this breaks view rendering - aka the bottleneck is still elsewhere. with things that render quickly and have that view cached on the nearest CDNs, and that have giant memcaches of the queries that will be used, you really aren't needed! fortunately there are many web services that are not designed that way, cannot be designed that way, but more so can't/won't be redesigned that way.
richardfey 5y ago
There are two or three scare-mongering arguments in the article that I cannot believe to be true. The rest might be valid but throwing-in these makes the whole post less valuable: - traffic might take your site down: it's never going to happen, although I understand why one would hope so - SSH attacks: change your default port - shellshock: you use or used CGI scripts in the last decade?
- jaza 5y ago
  Author here. Sure, maybe successful attacks in those categories are unlikely. But my main point was, so long as I maintain my own VPS, they're still possible, and I'm responsible for defending my box against them. Whereas in SaaS land, I don't even know what physical / virtual boxes the provider has, nor do I care, because I'm not responsible for their security nor for anything else regarding them.
  - richardfey 5y ago
    If you have run VPSes for some time, how come you have not learnt and taken some steps to make it less prone to attacks? That's the part I don't find credible enough, or can't share the rationale to include it in this post.
    - jaza 5y ago
      Author here. Like I said in the article, "... I've picked up more than a thing or two when it comes to Linux sysadmin". I did harden my VPS here and there, over the years. And there never was a successful attack on my VPS - not that I'm aware of, at least. But that doesn't change the fact that I simply don't want to manage a VPS anymore. Like I also said: "However, I've learnt what I have, out of necessity, and purely as a means to an end. I'm a dev, and what I actually enjoy doing, and what I try to spend most of my time doing, is dev work. Hosting everything in SaaS land, rather than on a VPS, lets me focus on just that."
simonw 5y ago
GitHub Actions has almost completely replaced my need for a VPS - I am getting SO much done with scheduled actions now. I also have a lot of projects which live in a GitHub repository but are then deployed by GitHub Actions to Cloud Run or Vercel.
LoveGracePeace 5y ago
I felt sad when I read all the "No more ..."'s then saw the cartoon and text parodying religion in a pejorative context and was done reading.
- cortesoft 5y ago
  I think you are misinterpreting the joke... it isn't pejorative against or parodying religion, it is making fun of tech companies handling security by just confessing security sins and then thinking that is enough.
  - getcrunk 5y ago
    That's a meta joke itself towards the concept of confession
pcr910303 5y ago
There was a hype on serverless, so a lot of people here on HN is a bit allergic on them and tell ‘an EC2 instance is all you need’. And it’s not wrong — I’ve seen seriously over-engineered serverless systems with so much AWS-specific code. But a few years passed now a lot more services now provide (almost) lockin-free APIs that are pretty useful for simple. IMO blindly recommending ‘just self host’, a sentiment that I see a lot in HN isn’t a good answer.
- tluyben2 5y ago
  Blindly, nothing is a good answer; you need to weigh your needs. But so most people blindly grab aws; unlike yourself, I find HN actually almost The AWS & K8s Promotion Team. People swear by this stuff here, even if you don’t need it, at all. They forget that not all startups have million$/year to throw away on devops to handle the bizarre complexity of those solutions while they also just really do not need them (now and, statistically, as they will likely fail, ever). It all always reads like resume driven development; I understand it; good people you hire want to do stuff that furthers their career. But it makes it blind in almost all cases I read here (which are tiny companies with no traffic at all, ramping up to be the size of TikTok overnight). But I digress. Ec2 is incredibly expensive (outside the free tier that is) compared to many other vps options. And as for serverless; last month a startup without funding was making a scraper and used aws lambda because it was easy. With their js code it took me 1 day to save them 1/1000th of their cost by using a vps; on ec2 that would’ve been a 1/10th save (outside the free tier which would not work; not enough power). This saving allows them to hire an extra dev for free to work on, you know, extra bottom line features to actually create a business. For a $10m-for-a-PoC seed invested startup, this is all the usual blah blah about ‘but it saves time on management’ (it doesn’t in this case or many others I have seen in the wild), but if you don’t have prior VC relations on speed dial, you might be funding it all yourself (for now) and cloud stuff is just shovelling money into a pit if you don’t need the upsides at this moment.
  - pcr910303 5y ago
    I find the argument that you shouldn’t be using serverless because you don’t have money to throw on devops a bit… strange? Isn’t the big reason on using serverless to avoid spending money and time to managing your own server? And IMO the lambdas-are-cheap argument is more like that lambdas are expensive, but they multiply to your scale, so it’s super-cheap in small startups. I view lambdas as a starting point for PoCs — they eventually have to move to VPCs, but lambdas are free if it gets no traffic. And that’s why I’ve mentioned lockin-free APIs: lambdas are terrible if you can’t migrate away from it. But if you can without much effort, it provides pretty good value.
gorgoiler 5y ago
Your Ubuntu VPS is free, open, loosely configured, and vulnerable. Your Netlify account is closed, tightly configured with specific focus on one problem, and secured with timely patches and a monitored network. What product is free, open, tightly configured, and secured with updates and a default iptables that isn’t just -P INPUT ACCEPT? Perhaps someone awesome is providing docker images that have the latest and greatest in single-problem-focused software, with a built in firewall, and a security team? That’s the kind of thing I’d be into helping out, in my spare time.
- getcrunk 5y ago
  As a js/node guy I would pay money for a opensource "managed" base os image with only 22,80,443 open with app armor/selinux configured and user accounts with plug and play containers for select from (nginx,haproxy,varnish,node,redis,postgres,couchdb)
phplovesong 5y ago
We had some BIG surprises with Netlify billing. Basically we use the functions they provide, and we racked up a HUGE ass bill. They charge PER request, meaning as soon as we deployed a semi "real time" interface for one app, the usage spiked. Really, "serverless" is just a fad, and overloaded term. How about you deploy containers instead, and MAYBE have your database provided by a "Saas" provider (database maintenance, backups, upgrades etc, are the real time consumer, not the app server itself)
- ricktdotorg 5y ago
  maybe serverless is a fad, but it can be a very useful one to reduce costs. our corp IT ops group has a google sheet that tracks staff's g suite/workspace-MDM'd corp mobile phones (is the OS updated? are the MDM policies up to date? when did the phone last check in, etc). the sheet is auto-updated every few minutes by a few lightweight cloud functions in GCP that query a few google APIs, state is stored in Datastore. the cost has never been more than $0.20 per month and it has semi-revolutionized how the corp tracked mobile devices. of course our win was multiplied by our use of g suite + associated services and APIs. but, in our case, the savings in both hard and soft costs were very real.
  - ZetaZero 5y ago
    I want to know more, please
    - ricktdotorg 5y ago
      it's all here https://github.com/rickt/gsuitemdm https://github.com/rickt/gsuitemdm
SassyGrapefruit 5y ago
Welcome friend, it's been too long we've been waiting for you. Through the process of acquisition I currently manage a physical data center that someone else setup to have "control" and an Azure data center that only uses Azure VMs "to avoid vendor lockin". I am in the process of migrating all these workloads to containers in a mixed ECS/Kubernetes and AWS lambdas. We generally see 90%+ TCO reductions. Almost 100% of my problems are in that stupid colo. If I never have to decode how the mail relays are configured, mount a user's home directory, or spelunk through Sys V init scripts/systemD unit files again I'll die a happy administrator.
jrapdx3 5y ago
For most things we want to do there's more than one way to do it. Ultimately it comes down to having freedom to try different things, to experiment with web technologies as my interests evolve. I really really dislike having to bend to unnecessary restrictions. I don't think I'm alone in that regard. A VPS is a great way to go. IMO managing a VPS is hardly burdensome, the amount of effort it requires is minuscule. Certainly far less than dealing with Windows on this laptop. Currently I'm self-hosting a videoconferencing server (jitsi.org, with customizations) that is used pretty heavily. Also run a server for a website created with my own software, call it developmental, experimental, whatever. Keeps me interested and teaches me a lot. No way I could do this stuff in conventional setups. While this approach works for me, certainly easy to see how it wouldn't work for many others. It's good to have such great options to choose from at truly affordable cost.
- stefandesu 5y ago
  Are you using Jitsi via Docker? I was self-hosting a Jitsi instance for a while for my friends, but among all the services I'm hosting, it required the most work and broke all the time. At some point I gave up and we're now using either Signal or, if Signal can't do what we need, some public Jitsi instance that we trust.
  - jrapdx3 5y ago
    I'm self-hosting jitsi in a "regular" VPS (4GB/4cpu). Though Docker is a popular and supported option. In the years I've been using jitsi it's improved immensely. The current stable version is quite usable, works fine when participants have good internet connections. I mostly use it with 2-5 people. Once installed and configured very little attention has been required. I'd agree that for larger meetings the public server at https://meet.jit.si https://meet.jit.si is a better option. AFAIK it's trustworthy, but of course my own instance provides greater assurance of privacy. Anyway I'm confident that's true, though I couldn't give a 100.000% guarantee...
    - stefandesu 5y ago
      Thanks a lot. Might try it again at some point.
seanwilson 5y ago
For people that self-host and manage security themselves, what steps do you take to actively monitor that you haven't been hacked? I understand how people would set up their own backups and automate security updates, but what do you do to monitor that there hasn't been an intrusion without you noticing (e.g. login attempts, successful logins that aren't you, files changed, root kits, data stolen)? How does that compare to what managed services and hosting companies with teams who benefit from economies of scale would do for you?
- cersa8 5y ago
  You can run an automated rootkit detector, but I doubt anyone able to get that far will be caught that easily. Your best bet is using application specific monitoring, eg for WordPress there are excellent tools like Wordfence that monitor login attempts, file changes and block common attacks. For my custom apps I will be alerted on brute force attempts, weird queries (sql injection attempts) and pretty much any anomaly is logged and will stand out. Another big one is monitoring for weird resource usage, I use Netdata for this. But doing some upfront hardening is the most effective way. I have yet to be hacked (as far as I can tell) operating multiple VPS servers in 10 year+ timespan. But have worked with companies that frequently had their servers compromised due to poor security practices.
fouc 5y ago
How do y'all run your own personal IRC bouncer without a VPS and without a home server? (no 3rd party SaaS)
- treesknees 5y ago
  You could look at a SaaS offering such as IRCCloud https://www.irccloud.com https://www.irccloud.com I haven't done this but in theory you could use something like AWS Fargate or fly.io to launch a bouncer/irc client. Really anywhere that lets you run a free container should work, if you can secure access to it. This could be a starting point https://github.com/taylorworthing/docker-irssi https://github.com/taylorworthing/docker-irssi
ValtteriL 5y ago
If it (the SaaS way) works for you, great, keep doing it that way. With the use-case and math in the article it seems like the most rational choice. For me, the sysadmin skills learned from running VPSs have come in handy and have gotten me jobs.
pnathan 5y ago
I run a kubernetes cluster on GKE for my dynamic tools, and host some other stuff on S3. Eventually I'll get all over to the big G. I got very tired of the VPS/ec2 node "hassle". Too much grief, too little payoff. What do I need a "true" node for? Not much. I know Kube well enough it's a straight shot over for me, with a massive capability increase. (And boy, do I pay for it. But it does give me a nice playground @.@).
rcarmo 5y ago
I did some of this, but simpler: static sites on an Azure storage account with Cloudflare in front, moved some things to a homelab to get them off the Internet, etc. But I don’t get using Netlify or other site providers, though. Seems like an unnecessary dependency on a free service that might go away.
- Blackstone4 5y ago
  I used to use AWS S3 public bucket plus the AWS CDN and it works well. Now I tend to use Netilfy as it’s easier with fewer configuration steps (no need to setup the CDN or SSL certs). I know I can go back to my setup if they charge a fee.
mro_name 5y ago
welcome to the world of T&Cs and smallprint. For your visitors.
teekert 5y ago
I’m also not on top of all that security stuff so I hope the NextCloud, Traefik and Ubuntu devs are on top of it…
numlock86 5y ago
> There are plenty of attack vectors: SSH credentials compromise; inadequate firewall setup; HTTP or other DDoS'ing; web application-level vulnerabilities (SQL injection, XSS, CSRF, etc); and un-patched system-level vulnerabilities (Log4j, Heartbleed, Shellshock, etc). The irony is that serverless doesn't even solve half of those problems.
- hathym 5y ago
  It doesn't, but it's someone else's problem.
rtpg 5y ago
I love so many of these kinds of services, but network charges really feel like a major rip off coming from the whole "you have a pipe, use it as much as you like" world. I get that these services mean you can get better perf, but honestly I would rather just have stable pricing and bad perf (which is fixable by turning a knob) rather than super perf and super high bills.
DeathArrow 5y ago
>The number one thing that I loathed about managing my own VPS, was security. A fully-fledged Linux instance, exposed to the public Internet 24/7, is a big responsibility. I don't share the view, if we consider small web sites or apps. For me, using containerized apps, having external backups of the DB, means I can reboot the app fast in a clean state if an attacker manages to break in and do nasty things. The OS and apps can be updated with ease, to stay up to day with security patches. Apart from some limited cases, I think it's cheaper to have your own servers if you don't have to pay much for their administration. And I hate not owning my data, my apps, having to depend on a third party.
- CodesInChaos 5y ago
  > I can reboot the app fast in a clean state if an attacker manages to break in and do nasty things. My biggest security worry is the attacker having access to data. That's what leads to reputational loss, fines, etc.
- 8fingerlouie 5y ago
  > For me, using containerized apps, having external backups of the DB, means I can reboot the app fast in a clean state That of course applies if the attacker only makes it into the containerized app itself, but (assuming docker is used for containerization) Docker has had it's share of 10.0 CVEs [1], and almost every other containerization platform out there has as well. Can you really trust a machine once it has been broken into ? Then of course there's the whole thing about the data. Nobody cares about the application or the infrastructure. If a sysadm is running the show, chances are that the server will be sitting on a DMZ network with firewall rules in place, so hopefully the network integrity is still in place. Your data however may not be, so you need backups. Depending on how you do backups, chances are that you're using push backups, which means that somewhere on your server resides credentials that can at least alter your backup, meaning if an attacker makes it into your server neither your data or backups are safe. > Apart from some limited cases, I think it's cheaper to have your own servers if you don't have to pay much for their administration. If all you're hosting is small web sites or apps, some of the major cloud providers has your back for free. Azure allows 10 million hits on their Azure functions per month for free, as well as free static websites. Oracle Cloud gives you 4 ARM cores and 24GB RAM for free to use in any configuration from a 4 core VPS to 4 one core VPS', as well as a lot of other stuff including 50 IPSec connections. There is literally no reason to run and expose any infrastructure from home anymore, especially not if it's "personal infrastructure". > And I hate not owning my data, my apps, having to depend on a third party. Define owning. Your data might live on a server, but if you create backups at home or somewhere else, does that not constitute ownership of the data ? As for depending on a third party, i'd wager that your data is much safer in a professional data center with redundant internet connections, redundant power supplies, redundant hardware, geographical redundancy, fire/flood protection, physical security and 24/7 monitoring than any setup you might have made at home, or if not, you're paying way more than you need to for your home setup. [1] https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list.php?vendor_id=13534&product_id=0&version_id=0&page=1&hasexp=0&opdos=0&opec=0&opov=0&opcsrf=0&opgpriv=0&opsqli=0&opxss=0&opdirt=0&opmemc=0&ophttprs=0&opbyp=0&opfileinc=0&opginf=0&cvssscoremin=0&cvssscoremax=0&year=0&cweid=0&order=1&trc=57&sha=7caeacb9a65bf38aa8ba5abe67c475a4cd18a219 https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list.php?vendor_id=...
kkfx 5y ago
I fear too many simply do not understand the concept of classic computing and so "fail" to "self-host" simply because they try to reproduce a cloud service provider infra they do not need at home. Personally I know few colleagues enthusiasts to have Proxmox set up at home and all of them fails to say why they need it. Similarly few "geeks" enthusiasts of their new toy no matter what, it's a "Widows classic" race toward colorful WebUI without asking if it's needed, useful or not. Just as a small example: even a personal, small, static, clean, classic website, why not just making with a homepage saying "this website is just the advertisement of my feeds, there are same random post as showcase, if you like them just add this or this other feed to you favorite feed reader, full articles are in the feed, no ads or so". If the website is just a kind of blog that does not sell products, live on ads etc why maintain it at all will all classic web things? Similarly why webmails? We completely miss modern MUA, yes, because all development is centered around web(cr)apps, but some for geeks/techies do exists (for instance notmuch, mu) and a frontend for generic user is not that strange (some exists, like astroid, but are not much nice probably because too few develop and use them) "hey but that means downloading their own emails!", yes. Emails are actually personal data no different than photos or pdf why consider them something else? Long story short: why invest FLOSS development time and resources to copycat big tech tools built to lock-in and control users, not for users advantage when we can know from the history, just looking for it, how desktop computing was born, networked and so powerful? A personal romance description: when I power on my desktop I hit a button and do something else while it boot (for instance taking a shower, eat something, get dressed, ...) it boot up with an "agenda view", witch means a sort of timeline and tasklist combined. A single key on my keyboard open a search & narrow UI for my personal data, anything, I can type first chars of a person name, get a pertinent result instantly, see the relative "card" with links to email exchanged with that person, specific threads I highlight, things we do together, things we have up/todo etc in a single "active" page. But also cards for my phone bills well ordered in timeline, with matching bank transactions, notes, notification mails, ... But also cards for ideas/projects, personal notes, investments, tools, ... My dishwasher break? Ok, a single key, few chars, enter/tab and I'm in it's card with info about where, when I bought it, relevant model, vendor, ... so in an instant I have all info I need to call someone for an warranty intervention or that's out of warranty etc. It's a magic web-app self-hosted on k8s home cluster run on two servers etc? No. It Emacs/org-mode/org-roam/EXWM/* and few bits of elisp and script to automate workflows enough. Easy to sync on all my machine via my simple homeserver with unison, no webui needed, from remote it's just fwknop+ssh just to be paranoid and get far more safety than a complex web auth with OTP, perhaps on crappy and full of vulnerabilities "smartphone" etc. Yes, collaboration is not so immediate, but just because Emacs community is not big enough, so certain aspects are not really developed and if you look around real collaboration is actually not really developed anywhere, for most that means a shared repo if you are a dev/ops guy or a shared "directory" to push&pull files from with some kind of extras almost ignored by 99% of users + some softphones. We have screen sharing, also good enough with certain apps, we have even near-real-time multi-users simultaneous edit of generic documents, almost no one use that feature. We just still have to learn how to push data/files around to really collaborate. Since from the Xerox Star Office System (not to be confused with proprietary LibreOffice predecessor) years have passed it's about time to resolve such issues instead of keeping play with bloatware and anti-users tools...
kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
Any recommendations for Java hosting? Most PaaS I have looked at seem to have a very steep price increase from self hosting. For example Heroku presumably is 50$/month, when currently I get by with a 7$/month VPS. And the next level would already be 250$/month. I also find it very difficult to make the transition because of the different types of units. How much RAM and how many "dynos" (whatever) will I need to get comparable performance to my VPS? Worst seems to be Google where I have no idea how much it will cost me in the end. I don't care about prices per second for all sorts of individual things (RAM, CPU, Storage, traffic - all priced by the second or other units), I just want a fire-and-forget flat fee that covers my needs with a reasonable buffer against spikes in demand. That said, of course the price of VPS is also high with the required time for maintenance. At least it is also a learning experience.
iansinnott 5y ago
So the solution here was mostly (entirely?) Netlify? Netlify is great (happy user here), but I was hoping to see the author's "suite" of solutions. Surprised not to see CockroachDB, Supabase, Firebase, NextAuth and the like. You can get pretty far these days on a free plan even if you need auth and a real database.
- jaza 5y ago
  Author here. For all my personal and small-client sites that previously had auth and a database, and that I previously hosted on my VPS, I realised that, no, none of them really do need auth or a database. An SSG (Hugo or Eleventy) and a simple host (mainly Netlify) will do the job. If I need auth and a real database, I'd probably still go with a more traditional architecture (Python + PostgreSQL is my go-to). Hosted either on a VPS, if I want to keep it cheap and simple, or on ECS / RDS (or non-AWS equivalent), if I want more scalability and resilience (and have the budget for it). But thanks for your suggestion, I'll mull over it.
ptman 5y ago
In case you still find yourself needing more than netlify can offer, you can get a pretty decent free VPS from Oracle: https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/ https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/ . Just remember to make backups.
- tasuki 5y ago
  That... sounds a bit too good to be true? But maybe it is true? Have you been using it? Are there any surprise costs (traffic etc)? Please tell more!
  - Havoc 5y ago
    They’re free tier is very good and generous. They have (or perhaps had) a fondness of killing peoples free accounts though so take care what you put on there
  - ptman 5y ago
    The one surprise I've run into was that they shut down the arm instances at the end of the trial credits period, even if the arm instances are "always free". So I had to recreate them from the block device backups. But that hasn't re-occured.
  - cube00 5y ago
    I suspect it will be like Google is doing now, once they have enough market share or don't need whatever they're getting out of their end (eg. stress testing their VPS offering) expect the limits to come in.
- Sharparam 5y ago
  You also have to remember to choose the correct region, as their free offerings are not available everywhere (and they won't tell you which regions have it available before locking you into one).
8fingerlouie 5y ago
I'm at the same page. After decades of self hosting, and gradually warming up to "the cloud", only to promptly pull everything back home in 2013 when Snowden happened, i've yet again moved everything to the cloud. For personal documents, privacy is handled by Cryptomator (https://cryptomator.org/ https://cryptomator.org/), and i make local backups as well as remote backups to another cloud. Everything else is in Azure. Their free tier offers generous consumption limits on Azure Functions and CosmosDB. I'm currently playing around with Oracle Cloud as well. Their free tier has some generous offerings of ARM cores, 4 cores and 24 GB RAM that can be provisioned as either 4 x 1 core VPS' or a single 4 core VPS, but that just brings back the problem of having to manage stuff myself. For the first time in decades, i have ZERO open ports in my firewall, and i'd like to keep it that way.
trippsydrippsy 5y ago
Can this article be interpretated as blatant spam?! I do so.
INTPenis 5y ago
It's not really more power in hands of corporate overlords unless you give them your domains. Domain names are the first point of contact to anyone using your service, as long as you control them you can move to any other corporate overlord at any time. That's freedom. I'm in the same situation as the OP. Except I still do have some VPS left mainly for tor exit nodes and DNS over TLS servers. The rest that did require some sort of VPS is now in managed k8s.
hardware2win 5y ago
I dont understand the xss csrf sqli part, it's up to the app generally, not the server, aint it?
Neil44 5y ago
Meanwhile I'm expanding my server collection to house ever more Wordpress sites...
karlkloss 5y ago
It's all fun and games, until your SaaS provider kicks you out for no reason, and their AI powered hotline can't help you.
simonhamp 5y ago
I'm not sure I understand why you would have a long-running VPS that you need to manually upgrade. Just build a new one with all of the system upgrades already in place and switch everything over... surely that's easier and safer?
- dangero 5y ago
  Is this a joke? And if not can you give a longer description of how this is easily done? How do you transfer all configuration to the new system and how often are you doing this?
  - simonhamp 5y ago
    No not a joke. I've done this many times. Use a server image as the base which uses the latest version of the OS and core packages and then have your own custom install scripts that initialise the new server with the elements you need from the latest versions. Getting those scripts right is the key part. Once these are set up, standing up new servers and burning old ones is a cinch. Anything that's not in a repo or package needs to live off-server, possibly in a cloud
1970-01-01 5y ago
TL;DR: Author discovers maintaining IaaS is work, and is happy to switch to SaaS. Here's a diagram showing the difference: https://www.redhat.com/cms/managed-files/iaas-paas-saas-diagram3-1638x1046.png https://www.redhat.com/cms/managed-files/iaas-paas-saas-diag...
- abriosi 5y ago
  Next level text summarization
staticelf 5y ago
I have a side project where I need to store a large amount of data. If I were to use a non rental server it would cost me hundreds of dollars each month while renting a large ass server with unlimited bandwidth costs me around $70/month. Sure if all you need is to host some static site it's all fine but if you need to host something more beefy that has requirements the costs are huge compared to rental servers. Also, there is the point of nearly all managed hosting serverless solutions is done by american companies so if you want to host in the EU for example to avoid surveillance there isn't a lot of options out there. There is also a bunch of different requirements that makes hosting on a serverless platform hard / more expensive for example: * Connecting to a third party that has some firewall based on ip * Using anything else than http * Having multiple sites where with a rental server you could host everything on the same machine it usually gets quite expensive since serverless stuff costs usually are per app basis. * As I've mentioned earlier, if you transfer and store larger amounts of data * Any requirement from governments and such that data is not stored on american companies * Long running processes The list can be long for when serverless is not viable and for most of the apps I've worked on a lot of them couldn't be hosted on a serverless platform for some of these reasons alone. Regarding the price aspect, I've found that if you have some kind of backend with a larger amount of traffic serverless solutions is always more expensive and I get why, it's managed and it's understandable. A rental server pricing is easy and predictable, a serverless solution pricing is complex and hard to understand probably by design. It appears cheap at first glance but in reality it's almost always a lot more expensive.
Diesel555 5y ago
I still use a VPS because my websites present user data and I host a GraphQL backend to store that data (Strapi, KeystoneJS, and NestJS). What is the alternative here? AWS? My frontends are static and hosted by netflify.
kactus 5y ago
I'm in the same boat. I ran and maintained my own VPS for a decade to host several WordPress sites. I'm not a sysadmin, and package updates can be a nightmare if you only deal with it once every few months. Ultimately I gave up and moved to SSGs + CloudFlare Pages, and put the WordPress sites I couldn't convert on managed hosting. My life has been so much easier. This all will change in the future - I do think the free SSG hosting is a temporary loss leader for these companies. Hosting on a VPS would yield faster builds and serving static files isn't hard. And I'm sure there will be even easier ways to host WordPress sites.
adamddev1 5y ago
I find that serverless is often so much slower than my $5 VPS. I like making Next.js apps with backend API routes. When I run them on Vercel they're verrry slow, even once you get past the cold starts. Running it on my own little droplet makes it incredible fast and snappy.
nonamenoslogan 5y ago
I did this a few years ago too. Turned my website in to static content and hosted it on Github Pages. Made all my sub-site project pages in to repos, moved the blog content to Github wiki pages, pointed my domain at it and done and done. I used to spend less than the author, $5 a month for my small VPS, but at the end of the day I realized less can be more and moved it all on to Github.

213 points by jaza 5y ago

smbv 5y ago

Cool blog, is there an RSS feed available anywhere?

boonscrolling 5y ago
https://greenash.net.au/rss/ https://greenash.net.au/rss/

mjevans 5y ago

There are still reasons to have a VPS. However nearly all of them are driven by one factor for me: American ISPs suck; cash from the wallets and otherwise. For one thing, they often make it against the ToS to host 'a server' (generally). ISPs with even remotely decent uploads, EVEN for their business offerings, in the metro area around Seattle (still crazy rent, can't even afford to try buying a house) are like CableCo for 1000mbit down 35mbit up for too much a month or DSL for (I am not joking) 7mbit down (if your connection is GOOD) and (LESS THAN) 1mbit up. At least for CableCo they also have far too many outages for long periods. I strongly suspect 50%+ of what I pay goes to someone's profit instead of even a tiny bit of (maybe not 100% speed) redundancy and ways of performing maintenance that aren't several hours overnight.

selectronics 5y ago
>For one thing, they often make it against the ToS to host 'a server' (generally). Beyond this, it can also be impossible due to lack of a static IP or control over the router (5G internet service with CGNAT). A VPS with WireGuard and remote port forwarding allows access for things like SSH.
- ixwt 5y ago
  Many DNS providers allow you to curl a particular URL to set the IP address for your domain. Set your server to curl it periodically, and it solves the lack of a static IP.
  - harry8 5y ago
    No good if your isp provided IP is behind an ISP nat. Eg via 3/4/5g Dongle. VPS can get you past that in a few ways.
- treesknees 5y ago
  Alternatively, CloudFlare Tunnel can do this for free without the need for a VPS (assuming you're serving HTTP traffic only.)
dannywarner 5y ago
The post recommends SaaS / IaaS in place of VPS. "It's 2022, and I'm here to tell you, that deploying stuff online purely using SaaS / IaaS offerings is an option, and it's often the quickest, the cheapest, and the best-quality option (although can't you only ever pick two of those? hahaha), and it quite possibly should be your go-to option."
- eek2121 5y ago
  For me, the solution is Cloudflare + (pick 2) random cloud providers + a sanity check for failover or bypass of Cloudflare if something really messes up. I run a custom stack on 90% of my sites, so it isn't feasible to use SaaS / IaaS.
  - Dracophoenix 5y ago
    What's your stack?
fergbrain 5y ago
Ziply Fiber has been great and I get 1gb symmetric for $80/month with no data cap. My homelab has never been happier!
toast0 5y ago
I'm in the metro area around Seattle (across the sound), and my CenturyLink bonded pair syncs at 92M/15M (it was 87M/11M but it mysteriously changed last November; pricing tier is 80M/unspecified). Although there are a lot of places where the speeds are what you quoted, if they'll install for you at all. It always shocks people when I quote my speeds though... but Comcast won't service my property even though they service my neighbors and are on the poll. My county's PUD has a reasonable fiber program, but the install costs are too high / too much hassle because I'd need to trench down a long driveway to the street. Anyway, the speeds are OK, but PPPoE is terrible (and I hear they run PPPoE over fiber around here too), and at least my Remote Terminal has no battery, only utility power and utility power on this side of the sound doesn't have a lot of nines. I've got a LTE hotspot to failover to, but the cell towers get iffy when the utility power goes out too. Anyway, I feel your pain. I run servers in my house, but I have to run a VPS for my 'important' stuff.
- btgeekboy 5y ago
  > I hear they run PPPoE over fiber around here too Yeah, the old CenturyLink fiber installs have PPPoE. New installs under the Quantum brand are plain DHCP, but still on VLAN 201. (Perhaps to discourage people from accidentally plugging in their router wrong? Not sure.)
swiftcoder 5y ago
> ISPs with even remotely decent uploads, EVEN for their business offerings, in the metro area around Seattle (still crazy rent, can't even afford to try buying a house) are like CableCo for 1000mbit down 35mbit up for too much a month or DSL for (I am not joking) 7mbit down (if your connection is GOOD) and (LESS THAN) 1mbit up. There are residential ISPs offering symmetrical gigabit fiber in a pretty good chunk of metro Seattle. I lived in an apartment tower so had access to Wave-G (previously CondoNet)'s insanely good gigabit offering, but friends who rented houses in the suburbs also had residential fiber.
- rhizome 5y ago
  Will they sell you static IPs?
  - swiftcoder 5y ago
    Depends on the provider, but it's not that bad to use a dynamic DNS service for those that don't (or something like a CloudFlare tunnel).
Nextgrid 5y ago
Have these anti-server ToS clauses ever been enforced? To me it seems like a “cover your ass” clause they put in there to be able to disconnect people who put undue stress on a shitty oversubscribed asymmetric network by hosting a very popular and heavy website, or if they notice a large business website being hosted and need an excuse to force the company to upgrade to a business-grade plan. It does not necessarily mean they’ll enforce it religiously without a good technical & financial justification. As long as your overall usage remains within the bounds of a typical home user, you’ll be fine. Keep in mind that nowadays home users use a ton of upload bandwidth for things like cloud storage/backups and don’t get cut off even if they saturate the pipe for hours, so you have a pretty wide margin to play with. Torrenting and P2P also use upload heavily and have been around for decades without many horror stories that I know of (the main problem with torrents is copyright infringement and not bandwidth usage). A self-hosted personal website or some apps (Nextcloud, etc) for personal usage will be a drop in the bucket compared to the above.
- gruez 5y ago
  > Have these anti-server ToS clauses ever been enforced? AFAIK some ISPs block common ports (eg. 80/443). That sounds like "enforced" to me.

cheschire 5y ago

Was there a typo in the final paragraph and the author meant SaaS / PaaS? Isn’t a VPS an IaaS offering? Edit: The author wrote “SaaS / IaaS” in the final paragraph.

encryptluks2 5y ago
SaaS in this context means pretty much the same thing but there isn't always a need to differentiate between them when it comes to buzzwords.
nine_k 5y ago
The author went from.a VPS, a VM he managed manually, to hosting everything on Netlify and GitHub, with a smattering of AWS. Thus the title. The author duly notes that a VPS does not belong to you in ways similar to those SaaS offering don't, so why bother. If all you used a VPS for was hosting public static web pages, then there's indeed little point to run a VPS by hand.

hprotagonist 5y ago

99% of what i use a VPS for is as a reverse proxy / tunnel, or as an IRC gateway. There's no SaaSing those in a way that scratches my itches.

neurostimulant 5y ago
Well, there is Cloudflare Tunnel if you need to expose something (ssh, database, http services, etc) to the internet without maintaining a vps to act as a tunnel/reverse proxy yourself.

encryptluks2 5y ago

It sounds like you never really needed a VPS, that you could have just paid some shared hosting provider $10 a year to host your site and been fine, but instead you chose to do so and now somehow came to the realization that you never needed to do so. Cool story, but then you throw in a bunch of stuff like about how SaaS is hard to compete against but simply because you never had a reason for a VPS in the first place. Once you calculate things like bandwidth, then SaaS is not hard to compete against... so if you need to upload 20TB+ a month with a 10GB uplink, then certain VPS providers make perfect sense cause you'd end up paying 1000+k dollars per month to do the same through some cloud SaaS solution.

rstuart4133 5y ago
+1 The things he has moved to SaaS sounds like it's, simple, public low volume stuff. My only concern is what happens if the free provider just disappears, but reading between the lines it sounds he's got that covered. His web site is in git, he has a local copy of his git repositories and he backs it up to S3. Personally I've always used SaaS for stuff like that. Much harder is personal private stuff like email / contacts / calendar / photos. Stuff you want kept private, you don't want to loose ever and must be online 24/7. In utopia the back end would be redundant store with copies stored at multiple vendors, so you don't care if one dies. And the front end is yet another SaaS provider that uses the back ends. If they disappear you just move to another one, pointing them to your back ends. In the real world you use Google or a competitor to do all jobs, they make it hard to export / import your data to other providers, they mine your data, they will make it available to governments and law enforcement agencies and possibly lawyers on request without telling you, and if they get the shits with you it disappears and you loose everything. In todays world that what SaaS delivers to most people, and it's reads like a deal with the devil.
- jaza 5y ago
  Author here. That's right, I'd like to think I do have it pretty well covered, if the free provider just disappears. They're static sites, they can be hosted anywhere. I have almost no lock-in (except for a few config files, and function hooks, that could be ported fairly easily). If one provider pulls the rug out from under me, I can move to another one. In the worst case scenario, if all the providers stop offering free static hosting, I could just move all my www hosting back to a VPS (although I'd probably move it to S3 + CloudFront + Lambda, which isn't free, but is so cheap for low-volume that it might as well be free). Yes, I agree, personal private stuff is harder. Before embarking on this static-site endeavour, I migrated my photos from Flickr to S3 / CloudFront, and that was a big project in itself (and Flickr is one of the nicer SaaS'es, that lets you export your data quite easily). For email / contacts / calendar, I'm pretty locked in (with one of the big providers), I wouldn't mind moving to a better setup where I own and I control the data, but honestly, it's in my too hard basket.

lrvick 5y ago

I feel the author presents a false dichotomy. I would argue that production servers should be immutable appliances. They should not have mutable root file-systems, they should not have package managers, they should not have ssh or require direct modification. Those are security accidents waiting to happen. I do not babysit my servers in my home rack. I have a company to run and better things to do just like the author, but that is no reason to give up freedom, privacy, and security. I like my servers to be as reliable and low maintenance as a refrigerator. They are not pets or a garden. Try container optimized appliance operating systems like Talos OS or application specific firmware-like images like Homeassistant provides and you can generally set up services with automatic updates and forget about them for extended periods of time, knowing they will auto-rollback and notify you if manual intervention is ever required. If they fully fail you can just restore a new stack in minutes from a git commit and your last backup.

edgyquant 5y ago
Interesting. Are there any OS’ that implement such a structure? Sounds kind of like chromeos if it was geared towards servers.
- jleedev 5y ago
  Container Optimized OS is quite literally “We let the Chromium OS folks make a server OS.” https://cloud.google.com/container-optimized-os/ https://cloud.google.com/container-optimized-os/
- politician 5y ago
  Nix?
  - edgyquant 5y ago
    I don’t think nix has an immutable filesystem, servers etc. Im sure you could build an imagine like that but you could do that with any distro.
    - 5y ago

bluedino 5y ago

Still have mine. $5/month, have all kinds of useful tools running on it. Can't get rate limited by my own IP checker. But I don't use IRC anymore really :(

dataminded 5y ago

Maybe next decade. I really like my various VPS.

esjeon 5y ago

I think OP is overgeneralizing a little. Cloud is all about buying resources(IaaS) and functions(SaaS) of your choice. That means, one can purchase storage and traffic like the case here, or CPU time and memory for data processing. One specific scenario can work for someone, but that doesn't define what cloud is or should be, because it's all about choice.

cutler 5y ago

Fine if you can make do with static sites but that's hardly a common use case. Most of us who use a VPS are hosting Nginx with a reverse proxy to Rails, Django, Express or Laravel + PostgreSQL or MySQL where the memory costs are a fraction of the equivalent cloud offering. I tried Github pages once, rather than Netlify, and pulled my hair out trying to get HTTPS working with a personal domain. Last I checked it's still not possible.

jaza 5y ago
Author here. A big part of why I'm saying "I don't need a VPS anymore", is because I'm also saying "I don't need dynamic sites anymore". I've been building dynamic sites for two decades (once upon a time "original LAMP stack" PHP + MySQL, more recently Python + PostgreSQL). I honestly never imagined that static sites could one day compete with that. But times have changed, and the JAMstack of 2022 has all the functionality you need. I've managed to convert all my old dynamic sites to be statically generated, without really compromising on bells and whistles. And the SaaS I'm now using is (almost) all free. As far as I'm concerned, I'm having my cake and eating it too.
- cutler 5y ago
  I think you're overplaying the "static" card. If you're using the JAMstack the static bit is only half of the equation. Need a contact form? Now you need a form-processing service and it's no longer static. If you're replacing old PHP + MySQL sites you'll need a lot more than a static site generator. "Mostly static" might be more accurate but then how long does that last? Clients typically want WordPress plus a ton of plugins. I don't see how JAMstack addresses that need. You say it's nearly 100% free but I just looked at Netlify's free tier and you're only allowed 100 form submissions per month after which they're $19 each. I don't think I would get a night's sleep with that hanging over my head.
  - jaza 5y ago
    It's up to you when you think a traditional server back-end is still warranted, there are certainly still cases where it makes sense. But if all you need is a contact form, then I'd argue that it doesn't make sense! Yes, I agree, Netlify Forms is a rip-off, if you need more than the free limit of 100 submissions per month (which personally I don't, but of course many people do). But there are many other options for simple form handling, I'd recommend looking into them. And the JAMstack can compete quite well with WordPress and co these days, check out https://myclientwants.com/ https://myclientwants.com/

habibur 5y ago

I see it like this : Once there were a lot of free tera byte image hosting services. And then after some market ups and downs, most of them either closed down, asked for subscription fee or hugely restricted what can be done. Free static hosting services might not remain such for long. At the very least, they might introduce terms or condition you might not like. Then it will be harder for you to shift to another service, compared to switching your VPS server. Also I count my time spent on managing the servers as free. For me it's experimenting what else can be done, gaining experience and overall enjoyable time spent. That might not be true for everyone.

jtbayly 5y ago
> Then it will be harder for you to shift to another service, compared to switching your VPS server. No way. I can move a folder of files to anywhere quite confidently. Even a VPS. But I have no idea what I would do if I needed to move my VPS. I’d probably have to start over from scratch.
- tasuki 5y ago
  If your VPS was build by hand over a long period of time, sure it's hard to switch to another service. If your VPS setup is automated by Ansible or NixOS or something, it ceases to be hard.
  - jtbayly 5y ago
    Really? And how does Ansible get the data from my old VPS?
Tehchops 5y ago
Sites hosted on Netlify literally just depend on a github repo with a TOML configuration file at the root. For basic static sites, which I imagine fit the needs of the majority of personal hosting, it's incredibly trivial to point the same repo at a different static hosting platform.
- 5y ago

vmception 5y ago

A long hold out! Works for most use cases. If you are doing any big data processing that doesn't neatly fit in a predefined resource plan then you are still doing all the SSHing etc. You might even be buying your own physical beefy computer to throw in the closet and SSH into from elsewhere. I wonder how long the likes of Netlify and Vercel will last though, before they too introduce onerous conditions.

mario_kart_snes 5y ago

IS this an ad for Netlify?

jaza 5y ago
Author here. Yes, I'm singing Netlify's praises, but there are plenty of alternatives - GitHub Pages, Vercel, Cloudflare Pages, to name a few - that are just as good. And it's a funny kind of "ad", when you consider that I'm paying $0 for my Netlify account, and I'm making it pretty clear that most other people should be able to use it for free too.

est 5y ago

You still need a VPS if you want to serve non-www traffic.

copperx 5y ago
Agreed. We need a Netlify for Gemini.
- MatthiasPortzel 5y ago
  Sourcehut pages offers Gemini capsule hosting. Edit: Sourcehut pages is the most direct parallel to Github pages but there's a bunch more options for free hosting listed on gemini://geminiquickst.art/ And that's not even mentioning the number of Tilde's that are configured to let you host Gemini content.

mac-chaffee 5y ago

I think people forget that unavailability can be caused by non-technical things like changing terms of service. It's easy to recognize that you shouldn't run something critical on a piece of software considered "beta", but too many people happily seek the loss-leading free tier of cloud providers. If your service is essentially losing money for the company hosting it, that's not a good place to be. Still trying to convince my company to stop using the Dockerhub free tier after they pulled the rug out once already...

api 5y ago

We will never see a renaissance in self-hosting unless administration can be made orders of magnitude easier.

paxys 5y ago

“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe” - Carl Sagan The same can be said for self-hosting. Everyone trusts some other person or company at some level in the stack. It's all about balancing the tradeoffs and finding a sweet spot that works for you. Too many people miss the forest for the trees – the important thing is to create and get your work out there, not endlessly argue about what sized hammer to use.

willis936 5y ago
No one never needs to trust copper wires or single transistors. One could, in theory, build an entire computer from discrete components and never have to trust external hardware or software. Of course, it wouldn't be very practically useful and would be a monumental amount of effort. But hey, it's a cozy thought for those chasing the trust dragon.
- nkrisc 5y ago
  I think in this context building a computer from individual transistors and copper wire is the same as “invent the universe” for the purposes of the expression.
  - dTal 5y ago
    Or baking an apple pie, to feed your electronics engineer? If you're going to carry it to its logical conclusion, "invent the universe" works in any context.
- shkkmo 5y ago
  AFAIK, we don't currently have the ability to compile any of our software from scratch. Every compilation utilizes digital artifacts that were created externally. To operate a "no trust computer", not only would you have to build the hardware for scratch, but you would also have to recreate more than a half century of collaborative advancements in computer science. This isn't a cozy thought for those "chasing the trust dragon" since it means that a true "no trust computer" is impossible to create for any single individual and even practically impossible for any group operating on a timescale of less than decades.

venkat223 5y ago

Self hosting VPS and SaaS are fighting to market their products.Whither net expansion?

freedomben 5y ago

When reading posts like this I often think, why do so many people not use Ansible (or an equivalent) for running these updates? It's really easy to get a simple start. You can do one thing at a time. For a while I had only an inventory file and a small play that ran updates. With a single command I can make sure updates are installed on all the machines.

jaza 5y ago
Author here. As I think I explained pretty thoroughly in the article, regularly running system updates is only the tip of the iceberg.

trey-jones 5y ago

I might need some perspective. Every time I read one of these I'm just shaking my head, and yes the arguments are Less Power, Less Control, but also SysAdmin is me. That is my identity, and the part of the job that I like the most. I solve problems with configuration before code. So I hate to think that I'm becoming obsolete, of course. I also don't think that I am, because I do think that my way has some clear and definite advantages over eg. Netlify. I also think that "my site is free as in beer and also lightning fast" generally transposes to "my site doesn't have any traffic". Am I deluded? I recognize that I have a clear bias, but even stepping back, I do think that even if some don't need a VPS (or server) anymore, that there is still room for my ilk in the tech world.

ldoughty 5y ago
I was a junior system administrator... And became an early cloud adopter... I think your viewing is valid, but yes, biased by your knowledge. Since you already know system administration, it's not hard for you to manage another system... That's your day job, what's a personal one? But for people who prefer code, handing that off is a blessing. I runs small light sail vps.. it took me only a few hours to write up scripts to manage containers.. and a few more hours to automate backups to a secure location in another AWS account... But for today years, what I just described is impossible, or a 1-2 week task.. not an afternoon... And this is our bias... For us, it's easier than learning lambda, or api gateway... But for them, those are easier than learning system administration. I also disagree with the idea we are becoming obsolete... I work in a serverless DevOps environment for 4+ years and still explain basic networking concepts regularly... Stuff that don't teach much of in computer science... Like failover DNS ... While managing DNS was moved to the cloud, many still don't understand the technical reasonings of things.
vmception 5y ago
> I also think that "my site is free as in beer and also lightning fast" generally transposes to "my site doesn't have any traffic" its more about being able to handle spurts of traffic and sustained traffic. these services are good enough to power whole communities and mobile apps. and that means it covers most use cases, as well as the placeholder websites that may launch a product once. and by most use cases, we're talking about just the 99th percentile of high load intertwined ratsnest products not being able to handle it, but even then that's only because of an insanely high traffic load that is loading unique queries that are impossible to cache and this breaks view rendering - aka the bottleneck is still elsewhere. with things that render quickly and have that view cached on the nearest CDNs, and that have giant memcaches of the queries that will be used, you really aren't needed! fortunately there are many web services that are not designed that way, cannot be designed that way, but more so can't/won't be redesigned that way.

richardfey 5y ago

There are two or three scare-mongering arguments in the article that I cannot believe to be true. The rest might be valid but throwing-in these makes the whole post less valuable: - traffic might take your site down: it's never going to happen, although I understand why one would hope so - SSH attacks: change your default port - shellshock: you use or used CGI scripts in the last decade?

jaza 5y ago
Author here. Sure, maybe successful attacks in those categories are unlikely. But my main point was, so long as I maintain my own VPS, they're still possible, and I'm responsible for defending my box against them. Whereas in SaaS land, I don't even know what physical / virtual boxes the provider has, nor do I care, because I'm not responsible for their security nor for anything else regarding them.
- richardfey 5y ago
  If you have run VPSes for some time, how come you have not learnt and taken some steps to make it less prone to attacks? That's the part I don't find credible enough, or can't share the rationale to include it in this post.
  - jaza 5y ago
    Author here. Like I said in the article, "... I've picked up more than a thing or two when it comes to Linux sysadmin". I did harden my VPS here and there, over the years. And there never was a successful attack on my VPS - not that I'm aware of, at least. But that doesn't change the fact that I simply don't want to manage a VPS anymore. Like I also said: "However, I've learnt what I have, out of necessity, and purely as a means to an end. I'm a dev, and what I actually enjoy doing, and what I try to spend most of my time doing, is dev work. Hosting everything in SaaS land, rather than on a VPS, lets me focus on just that."

simonw 5y ago

GitHub Actions has almost completely replaced my need for a VPS - I am getting SO much done with scheduled actions now. I also have a lot of projects which live in a GitHub repository but are then deployed by GitHub Actions to Cloud Run or Vercel.

LoveGracePeace 5y ago

I felt sad when I read all the "No more ..."'s then saw the cartoon and text parodying religion in a pejorative context and was done reading.

cortesoft 5y ago
I think you are misinterpreting the joke... it isn't pejorative against or parodying religion, it is making fun of tech companies handling security by just confessing security sins and then thinking that is enough.
- getcrunk 5y ago
  That's a meta joke itself towards the concept of confession

pcr910303 5y ago

There was a hype on serverless, so a lot of people here on HN is a bit allergic on them and tell ‘an EC2 instance is all you need’. And it’s not wrong — I’ve seen seriously over-engineered serverless systems with so much AWS-specific code. But a few years passed now a lot more services now provide (almost) lockin-free APIs that are pretty useful for simple. IMO blindly recommending ‘just self host’, a sentiment that I see a lot in HN isn’t a good answer.

tluyben2 5y ago
Blindly, nothing is a good answer; you need to weigh your needs. But so most people blindly grab aws; unlike yourself, I find HN actually almost The AWS & K8s Promotion Team. People swear by this stuff here, even if you don’t need it, at all. They forget that not all startups have million$/year to throw away on devops to handle the bizarre complexity of those solutions while they also just really do not need them (now and, statistically, as they will likely fail, ever). It all always reads like resume driven development; I understand it; good people you hire want to do stuff that furthers their career. But it makes it blind in almost all cases I read here (which are tiny companies with no traffic at all, ramping up to be the size of TikTok overnight). But I digress. Ec2 is incredibly expensive (outside the free tier that is) compared to many other vps options. And as for serverless; last month a startup without funding was making a scraper and used aws lambda because it was easy. With their js code it took me 1 day to save them 1/1000th of their cost by using a vps; on ec2 that would’ve been a 1/10th save (outside the free tier which would not work; not enough power). This saving allows them to hire an extra dev for free to work on, you know, extra bottom line features to actually create a business. For a $10m-for-a-PoC seed invested startup, this is all the usual blah blah about ‘but it saves time on management’ (it doesn’t in this case or many others I have seen in the wild), but if you don’t have prior VC relations on speed dial, you might be funding it all yourself (for now) and cloud stuff is just shovelling money into a pit if you don’t need the upsides at this moment.
- pcr910303 5y ago
  I find the argument that you shouldn’t be using serverless because you don’t have money to throw on devops a bit… strange? Isn’t the big reason on using serverless to avoid spending money and time to managing your own server? And IMO the lambdas-are-cheap argument is more like that lambdas are expensive, but they multiply to your scale, so it’s super-cheap in small startups. I view lambdas as a starting point for PoCs — they eventually have to move to VPCs, but lambdas are free if it gets no traffic. And that’s why I’ve mentioned lockin-free APIs: lambdas are terrible if you can’t migrate away from it. But if you can without much effort, it provides pretty good value.

gorgoiler 5y ago

Your Ubuntu VPS is free, open, loosely configured, and vulnerable. Your Netlify account is closed, tightly configured with specific focus on one problem, and secured with timely patches and a monitored network. What product is free, open, tightly configured, and secured with updates and a default iptables that isn’t just -P INPUT ACCEPT? Perhaps someone awesome is providing docker images that have the latest and greatest in single-problem-focused software, with a built in firewall, and a security team? That’s the kind of thing I’d be into helping out, in my spare time.

getcrunk 5y ago
As a js/node guy I would pay money for a opensource "managed" base os image with only 22,80,443 open with app armor/selinux configured and user accounts with plug and play containers for select from (nginx,haproxy,varnish,node,redis,postgres,couchdb)

phplovesong 5y ago

We had some BIG surprises with Netlify billing. Basically we use the functions they provide, and we racked up a HUGE ass bill. They charge PER request, meaning as soon as we deployed a semi "real time" interface for one app, the usage spiked. Really, "serverless" is just a fad, and overloaded term. How about you deploy containers instead, and MAYBE have your database provided by a "Saas" provider (database maintenance, backups, upgrades etc, are the real time consumer, not the app server itself)

ricktdotorg 5y ago
maybe serverless is a fad, but it can be a very useful one to reduce costs. our corp IT ops group has a google sheet that tracks staff's g suite/workspace-MDM'd corp mobile phones (is the OS updated? are the MDM policies up to date? when did the phone last check in, etc). the sheet is auto-updated every few minutes by a few lightweight cloud functions in GCP that query a few google APIs, state is stored in Datastore. the cost has never been more than $0.20 per month and it has semi-revolutionized how the corp tracked mobile devices. of course our win was multiplied by our use of g suite + associated services and APIs. but, in our case, the savings in both hard and soft costs were very real.
- ZetaZero 5y ago
  I want to know more, please
  - ricktdotorg 5y ago
    it's all here https://github.com/rickt/gsuitemdm https://github.com/rickt/gsuitemdm

SassyGrapefruit 5y ago

Welcome friend, it's been too long we've been waiting for you. Through the process of acquisition I currently manage a physical data center that someone else setup to have "control" and an Azure data center that only uses Azure VMs "to avoid vendor lockin". I am in the process of migrating all these workloads to containers in a mixed ECS/Kubernetes and AWS lambdas. We generally see 90%+ TCO reductions. Almost 100% of my problems are in that stupid colo. If I never have to decode how the mail relays are configured, mount a user's home directory, or spelunk through Sys V init scripts/systemD unit files again I'll die a happy administrator.

jrapdx3 5y ago

For most things we want to do there's more than one way to do it. Ultimately it comes down to having freedom to try different things, to experiment with web technologies as my interests evolve. I really really dislike having to bend to unnecessary restrictions. I don't think I'm alone in that regard. A VPS is a great way to go. IMO managing a VPS is hardly burdensome, the amount of effort it requires is minuscule. Certainly far less than dealing with Windows on this laptop. Currently I'm self-hosting a videoconferencing server (jitsi.org, with customizations) that is used pretty heavily. Also run a server for a website created with my own software, call it developmental, experimental, whatever. Keeps me interested and teaches me a lot. No way I could do this stuff in conventional setups. While this approach works for me, certainly easy to see how it wouldn't work for many others. It's good to have such great options to choose from at truly affordable cost.

stefandesu 5y ago
Are you using Jitsi via Docker? I was self-hosting a Jitsi instance for a while for my friends, but among all the services I'm hosting, it required the most work and broke all the time. At some point I gave up and we're now using either Signal or, if Signal can't do what we need, some public Jitsi instance that we trust.
- jrapdx3 5y ago
  I'm self-hosting jitsi in a "regular" VPS (4GB/4cpu). Though Docker is a popular and supported option. In the years I've been using jitsi it's improved immensely. The current stable version is quite usable, works fine when participants have good internet connections. I mostly use it with 2-5 people. Once installed and configured very little attention has been required. I'd agree that for larger meetings the public server at https://meet.jit.si https://meet.jit.si is a better option. AFAIK it's trustworthy, but of course my own instance provides greater assurance of privacy. Anyway I'm confident that's true, though I couldn't give a 100.000% guarantee...
  - stefandesu 5y ago
    Thanks a lot. Might try it again at some point.

seanwilson 5y ago

For people that self-host and manage security themselves, what steps do you take to actively monitor that you haven't been hacked? I understand how people would set up their own backups and automate security updates, but what do you do to monitor that there hasn't been an intrusion without you noticing (e.g. login attempts, successful logins that aren't you, files changed, root kits, data stolen)? How does that compare to what managed services and hosting companies with teams who benefit from economies of scale would do for you?

cersa8 5y ago
You can run an automated rootkit detector, but I doubt anyone able to get that far will be caught that easily. Your best bet is using application specific monitoring, eg for WordPress there are excellent tools like Wordfence that monitor login attempts, file changes and block common attacks. For my custom apps I will be alerted on brute force attempts, weird queries (sql injection attempts) and pretty much any anomaly is logged and will stand out. Another big one is monitoring for weird resource usage, I use Netdata for this. But doing some upfront hardening is the most effective way. I have yet to be hacked (as far as I can tell) operating multiple VPS servers in 10 year+ timespan. But have worked with companies that frequently had their servers compromised due to poor security practices.

fouc 5y ago

How do y'all run your own personal IRC bouncer without a VPS and without a home server? (no 3rd party SaaS)

treesknees 5y ago
You could look at a SaaS offering such as IRCCloud https://www.irccloud.com https://www.irccloud.com I haven't done this but in theory you could use something like AWS Fargate or fly.io to launch a bouncer/irc client. Really anywhere that lets you run a free container should work, if you can secure access to it. This could be a starting point https://github.com/taylorworthing/docker-irssi https://github.com/taylorworthing/docker-irssi

ValtteriL 5y ago

If it (the SaaS way) works for you, great, keep doing it that way. With the use-case and math in the article it seems like the most rational choice. For me, the sysadmin skills learned from running VPSs have come in handy and have gotten me jobs.

pnathan 5y ago

I run a kubernetes cluster on GKE for my dynamic tools, and host some other stuff on S3. Eventually I'll get all over to the big G. I got very tired of the VPS/ec2 node "hassle". Too much grief, too little payoff. What do I need a "true" node for? Not much. I know Kube well enough it's a straight shot over for me, with a massive capability increase. (And boy, do I pay for it. But it does give me a nice playground @.@).

rcarmo 5y ago

I did some of this, but simpler: static sites on an Azure storage account with Cloudflare in front, moved some things to a homelab to get them off the Internet, etc. But I don’t get using Netlify or other site providers, though. Seems like an unnecessary dependency on a free service that might go away.

Blackstone4 5y ago
I used to use AWS S3 public bucket plus the AWS CDN and it works well. Now I tend to use Netilfy as it’s easier with fewer configuration steps (no need to setup the CDN or SSL certs). I know I can go back to my setup if they charge a fee.

mro_name 5y ago

welcome to the world of T&Cs and smallprint. For your visitors.

teekert 5y ago

I’m also not on top of all that security stuff so I hope the NextCloud, Traefik and Ubuntu devs are on top of it…

numlock86 5y ago

> There are plenty of attack vectors: SSH credentials compromise; inadequate firewall setup; HTTP or other DDoS'ing; web application-level vulnerabilities (SQL injection, XSS, CSRF, etc); and un-patched system-level vulnerabilities (Log4j, Heartbleed, Shellshock, etc). The irony is that serverless doesn't even solve half of those problems.

hathym 5y ago
It doesn't, but it's someone else's problem.

rtpg 5y ago

I love so many of these kinds of services, but network charges really feel like a major rip off coming from the whole "you have a pipe, use it as much as you like" world. I get that these services mean you can get better perf, but honestly I would rather just have stable pricing and bad perf (which is fixable by turning a knob) rather than super perf and super high bills.

DeathArrow 5y ago

>The number one thing that I loathed about managing my own VPS, was security. A fully-fledged Linux instance, exposed to the public Internet 24/7, is a big responsibility. I don't share the view, if we consider small web sites or apps. For me, using containerized apps, having external backups of the DB, means I can reboot the app fast in a clean state if an attacker manages to break in and do nasty things. The OS and apps can be updated with ease, to stay up to day with security patches. Apart from some limited cases, I think it's cheaper to have your own servers if you don't have to pay much for their administration. And I hate not owning my data, my apps, having to depend on a third party.

CodesInChaos 5y ago
> I can reboot the app fast in a clean state if an attacker manages to break in and do nasty things. My biggest security worry is the attacker having access to data. That's what leads to reputational loss, fines, etc.
8fingerlouie 5y ago
> For me, using containerized apps, having external backups of the DB, means I can reboot the app fast in a clean state That of course applies if the attacker only makes it into the containerized app itself, but (assuming docker is used for containerization) Docker has had it's share of 10.0 CVEs [1], and almost every other containerization platform out there has as well. Can you really trust a machine once it has been broken into ? Then of course there's the whole thing about the data. Nobody cares about the application or the infrastructure. If a sysadm is running the show, chances are that the server will be sitting on a DMZ network with firewall rules in place, so hopefully the network integrity is still in place. Your data however may not be, so you need backups. Depending on how you do backups, chances are that you're using push backups, which means that somewhere on your server resides credentials that can at least alter your backup, meaning if an attacker makes it into your server neither your data or backups are safe. > Apart from some limited cases, I think it's cheaper to have your own servers if you don't have to pay much for their administration. If all you're hosting is small web sites or apps, some of the major cloud providers has your back for free. Azure allows 10 million hits on their Azure functions per month for free, as well as free static websites. Oracle Cloud gives you 4 ARM cores and 24GB RAM for free to use in any configuration from a 4 core VPS to 4 one core VPS', as well as a lot of other stuff including 50 IPSec connections. There is literally no reason to run and expose any infrastructure from home anymore, especially not if it's "personal infrastructure". > And I hate not owning my data, my apps, having to depend on a third party. Define owning. Your data might live on a server, but if you create backups at home or somewhere else, does that not constitute ownership of the data ? As for depending on a third party, i'd wager that your data is much safer in a professional data center with redundant internet connections, redundant power supplies, redundant hardware, geographical redundancy, fire/flood protection, physical security and 24/7 monitoring than any setup you might have made at home, or if not, you're paying way more than you need to for your home setup. [1] https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list.php?vendor_id=13534&product_id=0&version_id=0&page=1&hasexp=0&opdos=0&opec=0&opov=0&opcsrf=0&opgpriv=0&opsqli=0&opxss=0&opdirt=0&opmemc=0&ophttprs=0&opbyp=0&opfileinc=0&opginf=0&cvssscoremin=0&cvssscoremax=0&year=0&cweid=0&order=1&trc=57&sha=7caeacb9a65bf38aa8ba5abe67c475a4cd18a219 https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list.php?vendor_id=...

kkfx 5y ago

I fear too many simply do not understand the concept of classic computing and so "fail" to "self-host" simply because they try to reproduce a cloud service provider infra they do not need at home. Personally I know few colleagues enthusiasts to have Proxmox set up at home and all of them fails to say why they need it. Similarly few "geeks" enthusiasts of their new toy no matter what, it's a "Widows classic" race toward colorful WebUI without asking if it's needed, useful or not. Just as a small example: even a personal, small, static, clean, classic website, why not just making with a homepage saying "this website is just the advertisement of my feeds, there are same random post as showcase, if you like them just add this or this other feed to you favorite feed reader, full articles are in the feed, no ads or so". If the website is just a kind of blog that does not sell products, live on ads etc why maintain it at all will all classic web things? Similarly why webmails? We completely miss modern MUA, yes, because all development is centered around web(cr)apps, but some for geeks/techies do exists (for instance notmuch, mu) and a frontend for generic user is not that strange (some exists, like astroid, but are not much nice probably because too few develop and use them) "hey but that means downloading their own emails!", yes. Emails are actually personal data no different than photos or pdf why consider them something else? Long story short: why invest FLOSS development time and resources to copycat big tech tools built to lock-in and control users, not for users advantage when we can know from the history, just looking for it, how desktop computing was born, networked and so powerful? A personal romance description: when I power on my desktop I hit a button and do something else while it boot (for instance taking a shower, eat something, get dressed, ...) it boot up with an "agenda view", witch means a sort of timeline and tasklist combined. A single key on my keyboard open a search & narrow UI for my personal data, anything, I can type first chars of a person name, get a pertinent result instantly, see the relative "card" with links to email exchanged with that person, specific threads I highlight, things we do together, things we have up/todo etc in a single "active" page. But also cards for my phone bills well ordered in timeline, with matching bank transactions, notes, notification mails, ... But also cards for ideas/projects, personal notes, investments, tools, ... My dishwasher break? Ok, a single key, few chars, enter/tab and I'm in it's card with info about where, when I bought it, relevant model, vendor, ... so in an instant I have all info I need to call someone for an warranty intervention or that's out of warranty etc. It's a magic web-app self-hosted on k8s home cluster run on two servers etc? No. It Emacs/org-mode/org-roam/EXWM/* and few bits of elisp and script to automate workflows enough. Easy to sync on all my machine via my simple homeserver with unison, no webui needed, from remote it's just fwknop+ssh just to be paranoid and get far more safety than a complex web auth with OTP, perhaps on crappy and full of vulnerabilities "smartphone" etc. Yes, collaboration is not so immediate, but just because Emacs community is not big enough, so certain aspects are not really developed and if you look around real collaboration is actually not really developed anywhere, for most that means a shared repo if you are a dev/ops guy or a shared "directory" to push&pull files from with some kind of extras almost ignored by 99% of users + some softphones. We have screen sharing, also good enough with certain apps, we have even near-real-time multi-users simultaneous edit of generic documents, almost no one use that feature. We just still have to learn how to push data/files around to really collaborate. Since from the Xerox Star Office System (not to be confused with proprietary LibreOffice predecessor) years have passed it's about time to resolve such issues instead of keeping play with bloatware and anti-users tools...

kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago

Any recommendations for Java hosting? Most PaaS I have looked at seem to have a very steep price increase from self hosting. For example Heroku presumably is 50$/month, when currently I get by with a 7$/month VPS. And the next level would already be 250$/month. I also find it very difficult to make the transition because of the different types of units. How much RAM and how many "dynos" (whatever) will I need to get comparable performance to my VPS? Worst seems to be Google where I have no idea how much it will cost me in the end. I don't care about prices per second for all sorts of individual things (RAM, CPU, Storage, traffic - all priced by the second or other units), I just want a fire-and-forget flat fee that covers my needs with a reasonable buffer against spikes in demand. That said, of course the price of VPS is also high with the required time for maintenance. At least it is also a learning experience.

iansinnott 5y ago

So the solution here was mostly (entirely?) Netlify? Netlify is great (happy user here), but I was hoping to see the author's "suite" of solutions. Surprised not to see CockroachDB, Supabase, Firebase, NextAuth and the like. You can get pretty far these days on a free plan even if you need auth and a real database.

jaza 5y ago
Author here. For all my personal and small-client sites that previously had auth and a database, and that I previously hosted on my VPS, I realised that, no, none of them really do need auth or a database. An SSG (Hugo or Eleventy) and a simple host (mainly Netlify) will do the job. If I need auth and a real database, I'd probably still go with a more traditional architecture (Python + PostgreSQL is my go-to). Hosted either on a VPS, if I want to keep it cheap and simple, or on ECS / RDS (or non-AWS equivalent), if I want more scalability and resilience (and have the budget for it). But thanks for your suggestion, I'll mull over it.

ptman 5y ago

In case you still find yourself needing more than netlify can offer, you can get a pretty decent free VPS from Oracle: https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/ https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/ . Just remember to make backups.

tasuki 5y ago
That... sounds a bit too good to be true? But maybe it is true? Have you been using it? Are there any surprise costs (traffic etc)? Please tell more!
- Havoc 5y ago
  They’re free tier is very good and generous. They have (or perhaps had) a fondness of killing peoples free accounts though so take care what you put on there
- ptman 5y ago
  The one surprise I've run into was that they shut down the arm instances at the end of the trial credits period, even if the arm instances are "always free". So I had to recreate them from the block device backups. But that hasn't re-occured.
- cube00 5y ago
  I suspect it will be like Google is doing now, once they have enough market share or don't need whatever they're getting out of their end (eg. stress testing their VPS offering) expect the limits to come in.
Sharparam 5y ago
You also have to remember to choose the correct region, as their free offerings are not available everywhere (and they won't tell you which regions have it available before locking you into one).

8fingerlouie 5y ago

I'm at the same page. After decades of self hosting, and gradually warming up to "the cloud", only to promptly pull everything back home in 2013 when Snowden happened, i've yet again moved everything to the cloud. For personal documents, privacy is handled by Cryptomator (https://cryptomator.org/ https://cryptomator.org/), and i make local backups as well as remote backups to another cloud. Everything else is in Azure. Their free tier offers generous consumption limits on Azure Functions and CosmosDB. I'm currently playing around with Oracle Cloud as well. Their free tier has some generous offerings of ARM cores, 4 cores and 24 GB RAM that can be provisioned as either 4 x 1 core VPS' or a single 4 core VPS, but that just brings back the problem of having to manage stuff myself. For the first time in decades, i have ZERO open ports in my firewall, and i'd like to keep it that way.

trippsydrippsy 5y ago

Can this article be interpretated as blatant spam?! I do so.

INTPenis 5y ago

It's not really more power in hands of corporate overlords unless you give them your domains. Domain names are the first point of contact to anyone using your service, as long as you control them you can move to any other corporate overlord at any time. That's freedom. I'm in the same situation as the OP. Except I still do have some VPS left mainly for tor exit nodes and DNS over TLS servers. The rest that did require some sort of VPS is now in managed k8s.

hardware2win 5y ago

I dont understand the xss csrf sqli part, it's up to the app generally, not the server, aint it?

Neil44 5y ago

Meanwhile I'm expanding my server collection to house ever more Wordpress sites...

karlkloss 5y ago

It's all fun and games, until your SaaS provider kicks you out for no reason, and their AI powered hotline can't help you.

simonhamp 5y ago

I'm not sure I understand why you would have a long-running VPS that you need to manually upgrade. Just build a new one with all of the system upgrades already in place and switch everything over... surely that's easier and safer?

dangero 5y ago
Is this a joke? And if not can you give a longer description of how this is easily done? How do you transfer all configuration to the new system and how often are you doing this?
- simonhamp 5y ago
  No not a joke. I've done this many times. Use a server image as the base which uses the latest version of the OS and core packages and then have your own custom install scripts that initialise the new server with the elements you need from the latest versions. Getting those scripts right is the key part. Once these are set up, standing up new servers and burning old ones is a cinch. Anything that's not in a repo or package needs to live off-server, possibly in a cloud

1970-01-01 5y ago

TL;DR: Author discovers maintaining IaaS is work, and is happy to switch to SaaS. Here's a diagram showing the difference: https://www.redhat.com/cms/managed-files/iaas-paas-saas-diagram3-1638x1046.png https://www.redhat.com/cms/managed-files/iaas-paas-saas-diag...

abriosi 5y ago
Next level text summarization

staticelf 5y ago

I have a side project where I need to store a large amount of data. If I were to use a non rental server it would cost me hundreds of dollars each month while renting a large ass server with unlimited bandwidth costs me around $70/month. Sure if all you need is to host some static site it's all fine but if you need to host something more beefy that has requirements the costs are huge compared to rental servers. Also, there is the point of nearly all managed hosting serverless solutions is done by american companies so if you want to host in the EU for example to avoid surveillance there isn't a lot of options out there. There is also a bunch of different requirements that makes hosting on a serverless platform hard / more expensive for example: * Connecting to a third party that has some firewall based on ip * Using anything else than http * Having multiple sites where with a rental server you could host everything on the same machine it usually gets quite expensive since serverless stuff costs usually are per app basis. * As I've mentioned earlier, if you transfer and store larger amounts of data * Any requirement from governments and such that data is not stored on american companies * Long running processes The list can be long for when serverless is not viable and for most of the apps I've worked on a lot of them couldn't be hosted on a serverless platform for some of these reasons alone. Regarding the price aspect, I've found that if you have some kind of backend with a larger amount of traffic serverless solutions is always more expensive and I get why, it's managed and it's understandable. A rental server pricing is easy and predictable, a serverless solution pricing is complex and hard to understand probably by design. It appears cheap at first glance but in reality it's almost always a lot more expensive.

Diesel555 5y ago

I still use a VPS because my websites present user data and I host a GraphQL backend to store that data (Strapi, KeystoneJS, and NestJS). What is the alternative here? AWS? My frontends are static and hosted by netflify.

kactus 5y ago

I'm in the same boat. I ran and maintained my own VPS for a decade to host several WordPress sites. I'm not a sysadmin, and package updates can be a nightmare if you only deal with it once every few months. Ultimately I gave up and moved to SSGs + CloudFlare Pages, and put the WordPress sites I couldn't convert on managed hosting. My life has been so much easier. This all will change in the future - I do think the free SSG hosting is a temporary loss leader for these companies. Hosting on a VPS would yield faster builds and serving static files isn't hard. And I'm sure there will be even easier ways to host WordPress sites.

adamddev1 5y ago

I find that serverless is often so much slower than my $5 VPS. I like making Next.js apps with backend API routes. When I run them on Vercel they're verrry slow, even once you get past the cold starts. Running it on my own little droplet makes it incredible fast and snappy.

nonamenoslogan 5y ago

I did this a few years ago too. Turned my website in to static content and hosted it on Github Pages. Made all my sub-site project pages in to repos, moved the blog content to Github wiki pages, pointed my domain at it and done and done. I used to spend less than the author, $5 a month for my small VPS, but at the end of the day I realized less can be more and moved it all on to Github.