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Low-Cost VPS Testing

toys.lerdorf.com

111–120 of 141 posts

Re: Low-Cost VPS Testing

#111
post #107

I can't wait for PaaS prices to drop. I know they'll always be relatively expensive, but I'm primarily a dev (not ops) and I don't have the time nor desire to manage my own servers securely. Heroku lately has seemed a tempting offer, assuming I can run my apps on it (Rust based) , but at $7/m for little side projects it felt.. expensive for a no user side project. They can add up. A $5/m DO box can host quite a few a…

I don't see PaaS as a realistic alternative except for the simplest of apps. One always eventually needs to tweak the web server to get things like websockets, brotli compression, fast serving of versioned immutable files, or something else. Or run several servers with vpncloud.rs between them. It's not price that is a problem, it's the lack of flexibility.

That may be true for some, but it's not true for me - currently.

Ie, if I could get a DB/FS + PaaS for $5/m I'd use it in a heartbeat. If I run into a wall where I need to manually tweak some fine detail, I can always fall back to normal deployments, right?

PaaS in concept fits exactly what many of us seek. Deploying apps without managing ops. Just because it's not infinitely powerful doesn't mean it's a reason no one would use a PaaS. PaaS fits a very real use case.

In my somewhat edge case though, hobby/side projects, I can't pay much for them. So I manage the ops myself currently because I can save money, but if Heroku was just a bit more cheap I'd use them.

Re: Low-Cost VPS Testing

#112
post #67

A big caveat not mentioned for Digital Ocean is that they blackhole IPv6 email traffic. It took a while for me to figure out why it wasn't working since it wasn't documented in their documentation and there was no ICMPv6 response indicating this. Moved to Linode after that. I wonder if the same caveat applies to other providers that have improperly implemented IPv6 by not providing a /64.

I don't agree with their policy, but it is difficult these days to run your own outbound mail service and not end up in the spam box.

I gave up and pay for Gsuite as an SMTP smarthost so my outbound email isn't tagged as spam. That allows me to still process the inbound on my server if I want.

Obviously doesn't help the privacy concern if that is your motivation for running your own SMTP.

If, however, cost is a consideration, Yandex is an option. They will host SMTP for your domain at no charge. https://yandex.com/support/connect/add-domain.html (assuming Russian hosting is okay for you)

Re: Low-Cost VPS Testing

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fully agree with this. I'm using Cloud Run since the day it got into beta and never been happier. It beats all the other platforms (for docker) IMO.

Out of curiosity, what are you using for your databases?

I use Cloud Firestore, it's also serverless and is really easy to use for building SPAs as you can do a lot of things with just frontend code and trigger cloud functions when things in the database change.

I do wish there was a serverless SQL option like AWS has, but nothing yet. Can always use Cloud SQL, but as others have mentioned you need to access it over a public IP (for now)

Re: Low-Cost VPS Testing

#114
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Xvfb would give you the virtual desktop that the TeamViewer Server gives you access to. You'd still use the TeamViewer client to connect to it. Xvfb is just a way of running a graphical environment on a machine that doesn't otherwise have one.

That is... interesting. Is it maintained and packaged by the distros? It doesn't look like it. Duckduckgo gives me a bunch of old 2012-2013 results.

You should search your package manager, not Duckduckgo. On Debian-based distros it's simply called xvfb, on Arch Linux it's xorg-server-xvfb, in the RHEL ecosystem it's xorg-x11-server-Xvfb but might require enabling extra reporitories.

Re: Low-Cost VPS Testing

#115
post #112
post #67

A big caveat not mentioned for Digital Ocean is that they blackhole IPv6 email traffic. It took a while for me to figure out why it wasn't working since it wasn't documented in their documentation and there was no ICMPv6 response indicating this. Moved to Linode after that. I wonder if the same caveat applies to other providers that have improperly implemented IPv6 by not providing a /64.

I don't agree with their policy, but it is difficult these days to run your own outbound mail service and not end up in the spam box. I gave up and pay for Gsuite as an SMTP smarthost so my outbound email isn't tagged as spam. That allows me to still process the inbound on my server if I want. Obviously doesn't help the privacy concern if that is your motivation for running your own SMTP. If, however, cost is a consi…

Been running my mail server on Linode for almost 2 years now. Fortunately I've yet to run in any issues. Having setup all the stuff properly from day 1 probably helps (TLS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, MTA-STS).

Re: Low-Cost VPS Testing

#116
post #115
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree with their policy, but it is difficult these days to run your own outbound mail service and not end up in the spam box. I gave up and pay for Gsuite as an SMTP smarthost so my outbound email isn't tagged as spam. That allows me to still process the inbound on my server if I want. Obviously doesn't help the privacy concern if that is your motivation for running your own SMTP. If, however, cost is a consi…

Been running my mail server on Linode for almost 2 years now. Fortunately I've yet to run in any issues. Having setup all the stuff properly from day 1 probably helps (TLS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, MTA-STS).

Do you send a fair amount of email? Where I had trouble was running an ecom site. We set up all the things you mention correctly. We never sent any unsolicited email, but I assume people might occasionally flag a receipt or password reset as spam, and then it was game over for our email getting delivered. No issues since switching to gSuite.

Re: Low-Cost VPS Testing

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm quite happy with their free tier. I have two Ubuntu machines hosting various docker images. Network bandwidth seems capped at around 50mbps, but that is perfectly adequate for my needs. CPU is quite strong, it's two AMD Zen vCPUs. The compile times for a few of my containers was acceptable. Three downsides: -No reverse DNS (at least I couldn't get it to work) -No IPv6 -It's Oracle, I made sure I only used persona…

Free public (static?) IP too?

Yes. Instances keep their public IPs for the instance lifecycle. The IP is not reserved though, it is attached to that instance. So if you destroy that instance and spin up a new one, you won't have that IP anymore.

Re: Low-Cost VPS Testing

#118
post #116
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Been running my mail server on Linode for almost 2 years now. Fortunately I've yet to run in any issues. Having setup all the stuff properly from day 1 probably helps (TLS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, MTA-STS).

Do you send a fair amount of email? Where I had trouble was running an ecom site. We set up all the things you mention correctly. We never sent any unsolicited email, but I assume people might occasionally flag a receipt or password reset as spam, and then it was game over for our email getting delivered. No issues since switching to gSuite.

Personal email server so I only send a small amount. Sometimes a few emails per day, some weeks only 1.

Did the outgoing emails for the site ramp up fast? Did you only encounter issues with Gmail or with other big providers too?

Re: Low-Cost VPS Testing

#119
post #118
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you send a fair amount of email? Where I had trouble was running an ecom site. We set up all the things you mention correctly. We never sent any unsolicited email, but I assume people might occasionally flag a receipt or password reset as spam, and then it was game over for our email getting delivered. No issues since switching to gSuite.

Personal email server so I only send a small amount. Sometimes a few emails per day, some weeks only 1. Did the outgoing emails for the site ramp up fast? Did you only encounter issues with Gmail or with other big providers too?

It was a slow ramp. Issues with Gmail, o365, and others.

Re: Low-Cost VPS Testing

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free public (static?) IP too?

Yes. Instances keep their public IPs for the instance lifecycle. The IP is not reserved though, it is attached to that instance. So if you destroy that instance and spin up a new one, you won't have that IP anymore.

Cool, you also said appears to be capped at 50Mbps, however if you use the LB, might be more like 10Mbps ?

(according to the free tier description at https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/#free-cloud-trial)

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