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.
I don't need a VPS anymore
21–30 of 197 posts
Re: I don't need a VPS anymore
#22I 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.
Re: I don't need a VPS anymore
#23A 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.
Re: I don't need a VPS anymore
#2499% 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.
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.
Re: I don't need a VPS anymore
#25I 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 autho…
Interesting. Are there any OS’ that implement such a structure? Sounds kind of like chromeos if it was geared towards servers.
Container Optimized OS is quite literally “We let the Chromium OS folks make a server OS.”
Re: I don't need a VPS anymore
#26IS this an ad for Netlify?
Re: I don't need a VPS anymore
#27I 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 autho…
Interesting. Are there any OS’ that implement such a structure? Sounds kind of like chromeos if it was geared towards servers.
There are several options, one of the most popular Linux options right now is Fedora Silverblue[0]
"The toolbox is using container technology to bring back your familiar tools and development environment on top of the immutable Silverblue base, for the best of both worlds."
Re: I don't need a VPS anymore
#28Fine 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 sti…
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.
Re: I don't need a VPS anymore
#29You still need a VPS if you want to serve non-www traffic.
Re: I don't need a VPS anymore
#30IS this an ad for Netlify?
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.