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Is Setting Up a VPS Worth It?
- _8j50 4y agoFrom what I tried last year, the old VPS days are over. Anti-fraud has ruined it. Having valid payment and email is not enough, and even with that it will take days to provision one. I tried digitalocean, OVH and several big names and wasted a ton of money for a VPS I needed right away. Just get a gcp,azure or aws compute instance. Hassle is all you'll get with VPS these days. I can't believe it is so hard to pay someone to provision a VM. They need my phone, i have to go through approvals and so much other bs. 4-5 years ago I was able to get a VPS and a domain with some bitcoin within a few hours. Now some places have the audacity to ask for ID verification.
- zamnos 4y agohttp://www.rapidseedbox.com http://www.rapidseedbox.com still accepts BTC for payment (according to https://help.rapidseedbox.com/en/articles/1088663-how-to-pay-for-your-seedbox-with-bitcoin-and-bitcoin-cash-easy-secure https://help.rapidseedbox.com/en/articles/1088663-how-to-pay...), if that's your jam.
- throwaway81523 4y agoGo on lowendspirit.com there are plenty of VPS with no hassle.
- neets 4y agoI just added lowendspirit.com to my bookmarks bar, thanks
- neets 4y agoCan you expand on this with personal examples? For example, where were you getting VPS's with Bitcoin?
- throwaway81523 4y agoI don't use BTC but buyvm.net accepts crypto through coinpayments, whatever that is. prgmr.net (now tornadovps) accepts payment by check or money order, https://tornadovps.com/documentation/make-payment https://tornadovps.com/documentation/make-payment I had trouble getting a CC payment to work with another small VPS host, and they let me pay in cash (literal currency through international mail), but maybe that doesn't count since I was an existing customer they were familiar with, not a new sign-up. But if you're trying to run stuff on VPS's and you don't have any existing hosting relationships and you're trying to pay with BTC, that sounds odd.
- _8j50 4y agoThank you, I will check them out, I think I just googled VPS and went with the top results.
- unmole 4y agoAs someone who regularly sound up temporary servers in Digital Ocean, I have no idea what you're talking about. There has been absolutely no change whatsoever in how it works in the last 10 years or so.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoAgreed. I regularly use dozens (yes, dozens) of VPS vendors all over the world and never ran into this problem. Maybe this guy is signing up for a new account using an Iranian IP address and credit card a from blackhatforums.com.
- _8j50 4y agoHave you tried doing so with a new account? Or 10yo account?
- throwaway81523 4y agoPretty lame. You get used to all that stuff if you're a regular Linux/Un*x user. Set up your favorite container image or orchestraton playbook (I use Ansible) and you are good to go when you spin up a new VPS.
- iansinnott 4y agoFor small projects I'd remove the bit about 'saving money' being a reason to use VPS. If you want to get better at Linux, then by all means. However, if you'd like to save money, assuming you place any value on your own time, it's just not worth it. If your project fits in a "serverless" environment use Vercel or Netlify for free. If not, use the Fly free tier or pay a small amount of money per month. Use Supabase or Planescale for the db. For the price of $0-5/mo* you can deploy whatever you like, without managing the infrastructure. Then you can focus on building whatever it is you wanted to deploy. * The asterisk is of course that these services usually cost quite a bit more if your usage goes beyond the free tier, but you can always move to a VPS at that point.
- _2z1p 4y agoShared hosting is also a great option for small projects. It can be very cheap and if you stick to static HTML or PHP, deployment is as simple as a SCP or FTP upload. Plus you don't need to worry about configuring a VPS or keeping up with security updates.
- thisismyswamp 4y agoWhat is shared hosting exactly? Cheaper VPS services are already shared, with the server being a virtual machine on shared hardware.
- thisismyswamp 4y agoServerless has too much vendor lock-in and is hard to reproduce locally for development. A VPS takes some time to set up but over time can offset a lot of cost - keep in mind hosting is an ongoing expense, and handholding services can cost over 2x more (I would even say easily 10x more). > you can always move to a VPS at that point Then why not start there?
- pictur 4y agoI don't think it's worth it in terms of time. Maintaining the established system or adding a new feature is always costly in time. I think it's just fun as a hobby.
- amadeuspagel 4y agoCaddy Server[1] has automatic HTTPS. Makes this much easier. [1}: https://caddyserver.com/ https://caddyserver.com/
- stonewall 4y agoDo people not use Linux anymore? General Linux admin skills were common knowledge when I was in university ~10 years ago, and many people ran Linux as their primary OS. Most of my friends had their own VPS with little pet websites. Has the cloud killed this skillset? Seems increasingly less common these days.
- expertentipp 4y agoIt's all clusters encapsulated in bastions now.
- jacob019 4y agoAny thoughts on ufw? I usually disable that and just make sure that I don't have unneeded ports open. I configure iptables manually if needed.
- bosch_mind 4y agoI manage my homelab VPS that’s on the cloud with Ansible. Pretty cool but leaning toward migration to Salt
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- thakoppno 4y agoVirtual machine on my always on desktop machine has replaced VPS for me. Inside virtual machines, there are rootless containers managed by systemd.
- op00to 4y agoI was surprised at how much energy my always on desktop machine uses. I’ve set it to sleep now, and host my desired vms/containers on an intel NUC. 20w vs 200w idle!
- graeber_28927 4y agoSame here. My NUC eats around 18W when idle, which translates to ~58 Euros a year in electricity costs. (serves mostly as a NAS for Plex) 10x that in costs would be quite significant, and my desktop idles easily above 100W. (Ryzen 5 3600 and GTX 1650Super) When I'm productive, I get to around 0.5-0.8€ a day of electricity costs with the PC, and gaming for just a few hours occasionally puts me above 1€/day.
- op00to 4y agoMy real killer is lab machines. It’s not worth it to pay more for more power efficient machines with a lot of RAM, but it is worth it to automate turning them on and off when I’m done! I’ve noticed a pretty big reduction in consumption having things sleep or shut themselves off.
- chr15m 4y agoIf you want your own VPS but don't want to do it on hard mode, I highly recommend Piku: https://piku.github.io/ https://piku.github.io/ It's a PaaS you can run on your own VPS and it is literally one command to set it up on a fresh Ubuntu instance. Disclaimer: I help co-maintain Piku.
- replwoacause 4y agoWhat does it do? Does it work with PowerShell?
- thisismyswamp 4y agoI'm always reticent on these things because there's little assurance on how long it will be maintained. I appreciate when people give me code that I understand and would have taken me longer to figure out on my own - but a complex non-standard tool is harder to adopt.
- lampshades 4y agoTakes like 30 minutes to set one up and they're cheap. So, yes.
- anonzzzies 4y ago‘Setting up’? There are so many scripts and tools etc to just run one command to have whatever you need. There are services that will do it for you if you enter the ip and key. Not sure how anyone would spend more than 1 minute on ‘setting up’. Yes, it’s worth it, because it takes no time flat and VPSs these days are reliable and very cheap compared to cloud offerings.
- thisismyswamp 4y agoWe don't need many though, we need one that is easy to understand and works well. Perhaps you could share about your favorite? And jumping into the VPS world, I have not encountered any of these - although I have tried to learn as much as I could. So the fact that it wasn't obvious to me that I should have used some simple tool is saying something about how easy these are to find!
- pornel 4y agoIf you go that route, I also recommend using something like Ansible. Unfortunately, it’s more things to learn and more to set up, but it’s worth it long term. The problem is that you will set up your first VPS by spending hours installing packages and tweaking configs by hand. But eventually you will need to upgrade the OS, or switch to bigger hardware, or change VPS providers. And then it’ll be a nightmare to recreate all that snowflake config elsewhere without forgetting some detail. The upside is that it’s cheap and fast, especially compared to anything “serverless” that chargers per request.
- floatinglotus 4y agoI can’t imagine using Ansible to configure a single server, seems like the wrong tool IMO. Why not something like docker-compose and put all of the config bits into a single repo? That way you can clone the repo on a new server and simply rebuild the containers.
- lmarcos 4y agoHow do you setup sshd or the ufw, or fail2ban... with Docker? I do see the point on running nginx and a Python apps using Docker, though.
- Macha 4y agoHow do you setup sshd with ansible? You need some form of access for initial provisioning, Ansible doesn't fix that either. Sure, you can take that manually configured sshd and replace it with something managed by ansible _after_ the initial setup, but not before.
- bravetraveler 4y ago+1 for Ansible, or really any tool of choice. Even well-written scripts will do! Just know - if you go with writing your own, you're doing something someone probably already did as a module. With proficiency Ansible is like writing declarative pseudocode. Say what you want and a huge library of Python will 'make it so'. Eventually you'll have a library of roles that don't care about the operating system, maybe even the provider. A peer comment mentions docker-compose. That's fine, but I prefer Ansible -- the DSL can be made very similar with a role... and it's far more capable. Like preparing the runtime.