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I don't need a VPS anymore

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Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#41

Post by jtbayly »

habibur wrote: post #22

I 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 ser…

> Then it will be harder for you to shift to another service, compared to switching your VPS server.

No way. I can move a folder of files to anywhere quite confidently. Even a VPS.

But I have no idea what I would do if I needed to move my VPS. I’d probably have to start over from scratch.

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#42

Post by jaza »

encryptluks2 wrote: post #7

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…

Author here. I never needed a VPS for the bandwidth. But I did need it for dynamic www hosting (mainly powered by Gunicorn + PostgreSQL). SaaS / PaaS alternatives (e.g. Heroku - which I've used occasionally), or IaaS alternatives (e.g. in Amazon land, RDS / ECS / S3), in that space, are generally more expensive.

Now that my sites are "static" (the inverted commas are because there's still actually dynamic functionality, powered by serverless functions), I can host them on a number of different SaaS / PaaS providers, that have fairly generous free plans.

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#44

Post by yosito »

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…

Over the pandemic, as an ideological mission against surveillance capitalism, I went about as far as my technical skills could take me: self-hosting open source everything on a VPS, eliminating all FAANG software, Linux desktop, custom ROM on my Android. At the beginning, the amount of control I had over my data and my software was exhilarating. I learned a lot, and some of the changes will become permanent. But after about six months, I didn't have the free time any more to maintain all of that. I decided to switch to Apple's ecosystem and trust them to handle things for me. Yeah, I'm ideologically against some of their recent privacy and security moves. But at least they're not wholesale selling my data and attention to advertisers. I never did manage to find a suitable replacement for Google Maps, though I gave Organic Maps and OSMand a fair try. I tried ProtonMail and eventually switched to Fastmail. Still using Nextcloud for files, calendar and photos, but I'll probably switch to iCloud and/or Fastmail's options for those.

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#45

Post by shkkmo »

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.

AFAIK, we don't currently have the ability to compile any of our software from scratch. Every compilation utilizes digital artifacts that were created externally. To operate a "no trust computer", not only would you have to build the hardware for scratch, but you would also have to recreate more than a half century of collaborative advancements in computer science. This isn't a cozy thought for those "chasing the trust dragon" since it means that a true "no trust computer" is impossible to create for any single individual and even practically impossible for any group operating on a timescale of less than decades.

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#46

Post by jaza »

rstuart4133 wrote: post #20
encryptluks2 wrote: post #7

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…

+1 The things he has moved to SaaS sounds like it's, simple, public low volume stuff. My only concern is what happens if the free provider just disappears, but reading between the lines it sounds he's got that covered. His web site is in git, he has a local copy of his git repositories and he backs it up to S3. Personally I've always used SaaS for stuff like that. Much harder is personal private stuff like email / co…

Author here. That's right, I'd like to think I do have it pretty well covered, if the free provider just disappears. They're static sites, they can be hosted anywhere. I have almost no lock-in (except for a few config files, and function hooks, that could be ported fairly easily). If one provider pulls the rug out from under me, I can move to another one. In the worst case scenario, if all the providers stop offering free static hosting, I could just move all my www hosting back to a VPS (although I'd probably move it to S3 + CloudFront + Lambda, which isn't free, but is so cheap for low-volume that it might as well be free).

Yes, I agree, personal private stuff is harder. Before embarking on this static-site endeavour, I migrated my photos from Flickr to S3 / CloudFront, and that was a big project in itself (and Flickr is one of the nicer SaaS'es, that lets you export your data quite easily). For email / contacts / calendar, I'm pretty locked in (with one of the big providers), I wouldn't mind moving to a better setup where I own and I control the data, but honestly, it's in my too hard basket.

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#47

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#48

Post by willis936 »

shkkmo wrote: post #45
willis936 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AFAIK, we don't currently have the ability to compile any of our software from scratch. Every compilation utilizes digital artifacts that were created externally. To operate a "no trust computer", not only would you have to build the hardware for scratch, but you would also have to recreate more than a half century of collaborative advancements in computer science. This isn't a cozy thought for those "chasing the tru…

You'd have to make an assembler then a compiler by hand to bootstrap. It's a monumental task, but reasonable to do. The blueprints are all there. Re-implementing modern operating systems and complex languages and the tools that run on them? That's wholly impossible for one human lifetime.

This is one of my favorite youtube videos in the past year.

https://youtu.be/SJ7lOus1FzQ

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#49

Post by jaza »

freedomben wrote: post #35

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.

Author here. As I think I explained pretty thoroughly in the article, regularly running system updates is only the tip of the iceberg.

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#50

Post by blown_gasket »

yosito wrote: post #44
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…

Over the pandemic, as an ideological mission against surveillance capitalism, I went about as far as my technical skills could take me: self-hosting open source everything on a VPS, eliminating all FAANG software, Linux desktop, custom ROM on my Android. At the beginning, the amount of control I had over my data and my software was exhilarating. I learned a lot, and some of the changes will become permanent. But afte…

If you're interested, Here (the PaaS for automative industry in-dash nav), has a website based maps: https://wego.here.com. They also have a phone app. I only found this out because I was looking into where my vehicle pulled it's in-dash nav maps from.
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