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I don't need a VPS anymore

greenash.net.au

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Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#4

Post by mjevans »

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.

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#7

Post by encryptluks2 »

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.

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#8

Post by encryptluks2 »

cheschire wrote: post #5

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.

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.

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#9

Post by lrvick »

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.

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