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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

#31

Post by mac-chaffee »

I think people forget that unavailability can be caused by non-technical things like changing terms of service.

It's easy to recognize that you shouldn't run something critical on a piece of software considered "beta", but too many people happily seek the loss-leading free tier of cloud providers.

If your service is essentially losing money for the company hosting it, that's not a good place to be. Still trying to convince my company to stop using the Dockerhub free tier after they pulled the rug out once already...

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#33

Post by paxys »

“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe” - Carl Sagan

The same can be said for self-hosting. Everyone trusts some other person or company at some level in the stack. It's all about balancing the tradeoffs and finding a sweet spot that works for you. Too many people miss the forest for the trees – the important thing is to create and get your work out there, not endlessly argue about what sized hammer to use.

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#35

Post by freedomben »

When reading posts like this I often think, why do so many people not use Ansible (or an equivalent) for running these updates?

It's really easy to get a simple start. You can do one thing at a time. For a while I had only an inventory file and a small play that ran updates. With a single command I can make sure updates are installed on all the machines.

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#36

Post by willis936 »

paxys wrote: post #33

“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe” - Carl Sagan The same can be said for self-hosting. Everyone trusts some other person or company at some level in the stack. It's all about balancing the tradeoffs and finding a sweet spot that works for you. Too many people miss the forest for the trees – the important thing is to create and get your work out there, not endlessly arg…

No one never needs to trust copper wires or single transistors. One could, in theory, build an entire computer from discrete components and never have to trust external hardware or software. Of course, it wouldn't be very practically useful and would be a monumental amount of effort.

But hey, it's a cozy thought for those chasing the trust dragon.

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#37

Post by dannywarner »

mjevans wrote: post #4

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 Cable…

The post recommends SaaS / IaaS in place of VPS.

"It's 2022, and I'm here to tell you, that deploying stuff online purely using SaaS / IaaS offerings is an option, and it's often the quickest, the cheapest, and the best-quality option (although can't you only ever pick two of those? hahaha), and it quite possibly should be your go-to option."

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#38

Post by BFLpL0QNek »

politician wrote: post #14
edgyquant wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. Are there any OS’ that implement such a structure? Sounds kind of like chromeos if it was geared towards servers.

Nix?

This is a great blog post on how to do this on nix, https://grahamc.com/blog/erase-your-darlings .

My Nix machine is stateless apart from a few directories such as home that I want to remain across reboots. When I shutdown/restart the server anything not in a mount I’ve explicitly configured to be persisted, gets erased.

The initial setup was a bit of work but the end result works flawlessly.

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#39

Post by nkrisc »

willis936 wrote: post #36
paxys wrote: post #33

“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe” - Carl Sagan The same can be said for self-hosting. Everyone trusts some other person or company at some level in the stack. It's all about balancing the tradeoffs and finding a sweet spot that works for you. Too many people miss the forest for the trees – the important thing is to create and get your work out there, not endlessly arg…

No one never needs to trust copper wires or single transistors. One could, in theory, build an entire computer from discrete components and never have to trust external hardware or software. Of course, it wouldn't be very practically useful and would be a monumental amount of effort. But hey, it's a cozy thought for those chasing the trust dragon.

I think in this context building a computer from individual transistors and copper wire is the same as “invent the universe” for the purposes of the expression.

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#40

Post by tyingq »

lrvick wrote: post #9

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 autho…

There is still some work there for the use cases he's mentioned (git hosts, backups, web servers). Rotating https certs, adding mutable volumes for backups, ssh (you say you don't need it, but it's pretty useful if you're running a git server), and so on. So, yes, they can do much of what you're describing, but it doesn't always work out of the box...there's work involved.
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