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Rent a $5/mo Linux VPS and be happy. I think more people should do this because what you learn (and you'll learn a lot) is the foundation of everything else. Do
by simpaticoder 3y ago
Rent a $5/mo Linux VPS and be happy. I think more people should do this because what you learn (and you'll learn a lot) is the foundation of everything else. Do this even if you are a programmer used to deploying to sophisitcated CI/CD stacks and k8s. The tight resource constraints (e.g. 1G RAM) are good for you - they make you think, and take care what you run and when you run it. Learn to setup ssh on both ends; learn to tail auth.log; learn how to write bash library functions; learn to run podman if you must; learn to update your OS; learn about tmux and htop and a 1000 other things. Literally all of these skills are applicable to everything else - they are elementary. If you ship it you own it and if you think you can avoid learning this stuff you're wrong. Take heart: the stakes are very low so you can make mistakes. The worst that will happen is hackers take over your VPS and ddos someone for a bit and you have to wipe and start over.
- a1o 3y agoDo you have a link to this 5 dollar service you mention? The ones I knew have risen prices considerably.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- cthor 3y agolinode has a $5/mo plan
- lsferreira42 3y agoI do: https://www.vultr.com/pricing/ https://www.vultr.com/pricing/
- whalesalad 3y ago- https://www.linode.com/pricing/#compute-shared https://www.linode.com/pricing/#compute-shared - https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud-compute/ https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud-compute/ - https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/droplets https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/droplets
- coder543 3y agoalso, https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/#Virtual_servers https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/#Virtual_servers lots of hosting providers with cheap options these days.
- CJefferson 3y agoWell, it’s cheap until a badly behaved script starts sending lots of data and Amazon charges your card a huge bill (unless they’ve finally got around to hard price caps?)
- coder543 3y agoNone of these 4 providers do hard caps. If a lack of hard caps is your complaint, file it against all of them. Lightsail instances each include at least 1TB of transfer each month, which is the same as DigitalOcean. Vultr and Linode also charge network overage fees on a per gigabyte basis if you transfer too much. Absolutely, everyone should set up billing alerts on any of these services. I'm not here to say Lightsail is the absolute best option, just an option.
- CJefferson 3y agoI was told digitaloceon at least had caps, but you are right, none of them do. In which case, I’m not using any of them outside of an LLC.
- graemep 3y agoOVH has unmetered VPSs: https://www.ovhcloud.com/en-gb/vps/ https://www.ovhcloud.com/en-gb/vps/ I suspect the bandwidth is lower, but that is fair enough.
- donio 3y agoTornado VPS (used to be prgmr.com) is another one: https://tornadovps.com/order/main/packages/xen/ https://tornadovps.com/order/main/packages/xen/ For $5 you get 1.25 GiB RAM and 15 GiB SSD. Started using them for almost 15 years ago when running an SMTP server on home-tier internet connections became less feasible.
- simpaticoder 3y agoI use Linode (now Akamai Cloud). Oddly the "Linode 1GB" plan doesn't seem to have a link - you can find it in the shared cpu section under "Nanode 1GB" https://www.linode.com/pricing/#compute-shared https://www.linode.com/pricing/#compute-shared. The impression I get is that most $5 VPSes are basically the same, although I've really only used Linode. They give you some useful free stuff like an external firewall/router and monitoring (with only 24 hours of history, but that's plenty). Their docs and scripts are really good too if, like me, you're only a dilettante sysadmin.
- qaq 3y agohttps://www.hetzner.com/ https://www.hetzner.com/ will give you 2GB for $5
- apitman 3y agoAnd absurd amounts of traffic
- simpaticoder 3y agoWow, I may move there. They even have EU only ARM instances with 2 cores and 4GB of RAM for $5/mo, which is amazing value.
- jodrellblank 3y agoI get them from the aggregator https://lowendbox.com https://lowendbox.com when companies offer deals; some have been great, some poor, but all very cheap; I think $14/year has been a decent one. Although my current one only has 512MB RAM and isn’t enough for Rust to compile Scryer Prolog. Prolog, a language first run on the computers of 1971 and standardised around 1998.
- antifa 3y agoThere's also some $1/month and $30/year options if you look hard enough.
- arcastroe 3y agoThe biggest bang for your buck will be with Contabo. I've tried OVH and Cloudfanatic as well, but recently settled on Contabo just because it's cheaper
- humbleharbinger 3y agoI went this route and got taken over by hackers multiples times. It was very worth it. I got taken over by hackers because my password for ssh was "mars". Me and my little brother were sharing it and wanted an easy password (yeah we have ssh keys now). Anyways, we both learnt a lot (htop tmux etc) . I'm always jealous that he got to learn everything earlier than me. But if he's not better than me then I consider myself a failure wrt being an older brother. The only drawback is that this doesn't work if you want to do ai stuff. For those use cases I rent a machine on paper space for a cheap hourly rate.
- simpaticoder 3y ago>I got taken over by hackers I'm a little sad I never was. I started with the Linode "hardening linux guide" and so had a firewall and disabled ssh passwords from day 1. I still have fun looking at the failed attempts on 22 and 443. My server gets so many weird requests, and they used to crash the server. A few iterations and that stopped happening. Oh, another thing that's worth learning: how to acquire and refresh a Lets Encrypt TLS cert via the ACME protocol. Doing this requires interesting confluence of skills and tools - you must carve out a vestigial http route in your server, and also configure certbot and cron. And working out the bugs takes a few iterations. (You could install Caddy, but where's the fun in that?!) Making it all work, from scratch, made me feel happy in the same way that when I watch people rebuild carburetors or who build bookshelves from scratch makes them feel. It's not new, it's not innovative, but its good. And it's always more interesting than you'd ever suspect.
- adamparsons 3y agoI thought I had been once, and got a very scary email that came from my own domain, claiming to have gotten into my things, and I fully assumed it was the VPS that got hacked. After calming down and raiding the shit out of everything I realized it was just plain old domain spoofing. Both disappointing and terrifying at the same time!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- 3y ago
- dash2 3y agoIs this actually a good idea? Won't you be investing in a lot of obsolete skills?
- wutwutwat 3y agoYou have to be trolling Learning how linux operates, ops is done, networks are configured, firewalls are hardened, processes are monitored, resources are allocated, disks are backed up, ips are assigned, routing tables work, symlinks work, and code is deployed is never going to be an obsolete skill. Pick whatever amazing heroku, fly, render, replit, next, k8s, nomad, docker, whatever platform you think has abstracted things away to make those skills obsolete and you'll find an entire cohort of our industry dedicated to using those skills to keep those services online, improving how they operate, and writing the literal software that powers them. Do you think docker or k8s could exist without Ops knowledge or systems programmers?
- dash2 3y agoI am not trolling. My view is that there will be a few very smart people at the companies you mention, doing those things. But most jobs in the tech industry will not require those skills. That's the point of specialization. It is efficient. You claim that linux, disk backup and routing tables will never be obsolete. Really?
- scubazealous 3y agoI am curious what your background or specialization is, but I can confirm the skills you learn from Linux, backups, and networking will be applicable now and in the future. The only thing they can do is help make you a better engineer.
- dash2 3y agoI'm an outsider. But sometimes they see things insiders don't, or don't want to. I'm an economist, and in my reading of economic history, I have yet to hear of a skill that always stayed applicable.
- wonrax 3y agoI currently host a personal VPN and my website (which includes a static blog, a Rust API, and a Postgres database), all on a $6/m VPS. Being a first-time customer, the service provider offered a 100% bonus on the credit I deposited making it even half as expensive. It probably won't hold up when the site has decent traffic, but for now it's the best money I've spent.
- apitman 3y agoWhat do you do with the API?
- wonrax 3y agoCurrently it has only one API route to simultaneously increments the view count in Postgres and returns an HTML badge containing the count. In the future I want to use it for authentication, particularly for admin routes and other stuff to access my private data.
- coding398 3y agoI'm glad I did. All of my websites with domains now run off of a little Droplet running a bodgy bit of software I made called "Run my stuff" it does that, runs my websites, tunnels it through ngnix, and uses CloudFlare to bring it to the internet. Very simple, but what works, works.