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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

#51

Post by cutler »

jaza wrote: post #28
cutler wrote: post #21

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 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 functio…

I think you're overplaying the "static" card. If you're using the JAMstack the static bit is only half of the equation. Need a contact form? Now you need a form-processing service and it's no longer static. If you're replacing old PHP + MySQL sites you'll need a lot more than a static site generator. "Mostly static" might be more accurate but then how long does that last? Clients typically want WordPress plus a ton of plugins. I don't see how JAMstack addresses that need. You say it's nearly 100% free but I just looked at Netlify's free tier and you're only allowed 100 form submissions per month after which they're $19 each. I don't think I would get a night's sleep with that hanging over my head.

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#52

Post by encryptluks2 »

jaza wrote: post #42
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 functionali…

And that is understandable. I have my site hosted on GitLab Pages for free and love that it is fast and feels dynamic even though it is static. However, I also have some other stuff that takes up quite a bit of storage that would only work on a VPS or dedicated server, but in pricing it out with cloud providers it was like 100x the cost.

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#53

Post by eek2121 »

dannywarner wrote: post #37
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."

For me, the solution is Cloudflare + (pick 2) random cloud providers + a sanity check for failover or bypass of Cloudflare if something really messes up.

I run a custom stack on 90% of my sites, so it isn't feasible to use SaaS / IaaS.

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#54

Post by lrvick »

tyingq wrote: post #40
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.

I run ssh for git inside a "from scratch" container with the git binary running unprivileged as an application. There is no need to interact with the host operating system.

Backups can be handled by a backup container. If the host OS is stateless, there is nothing to backup. All you care about are data volumes, which you can then use any automated container daemon backup solution for. A very well solved problem.

For rotating https certs, there are endless letsencrypt containers that automate that for you too.

The point is you do the work for what you need up front, once, and then you don't need much work to keep it maintained.

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#55

Post by Tehchops »

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…

Sites hosted on Netlify literally just depend on a github repo with a TOML configuration file at the root.

For basic static sites, which I imagine fit the needs of the majority of personal hosting, it's incredibly trivial to point the same repo at a different static hosting platform.

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#56

Post by kelnos »

tyingq wrote: post #40
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.

I think the point there is that all of what you've mentioned are one-time "costs". You set them up in the beginning (and presumably the parent is managing this stuff in Ansible or Chef or whatever, so if the box irreparably dies, it's not hard to provision a new one) and then you don't need to worry about them.

(The one recurring thing is TLS cert rotation, but for a home/personal server I'd presume most people would just use Let's Encrypt via certbot, which will auto-renew via cron.)

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#57

Post by trey-jones »

I might need some perspective. Every time I read one of these I'm just shaking my head, and yes the arguments are Less Power, Less Control, but also SysAdmin is me. That is my identity, and the part of the job that I like the most. I solve problems with configuration before code. So I hate to think that I'm becoming obsolete, of course. I also don't think that I am, because I do think that my way has some clear and definite advantages over eg. Netlify. I also think that "my site is free as in beer and also lightning fast" generally transposes to "my site doesn't have any traffic". Am I deluded? I recognize that I have a clear bias, but even stepping back, I do think that even if some don't need a VPS (or server) anymore, that there is still room for my ilk in the tech world.

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#58

Post by ixwt »

selectronics wrote: post #17
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…

>For one thing, they often make it against the ToS to host 'a server' (generally). Beyond this, it can also be impossible due to lack of a static IP or control over the router (5G internet service with CGNAT). A VPS with WireGuard and remote port forwarding allows access for things like SSH.

Many DNS providers allow you to curl a particular URL to set the IP address for your domain. Set your server to curl it periodically, and it solves the lack of a static IP.

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#59

Post by richardfey »

There are two or three scare-mongering arguments in the article that I cannot believe to be true. The rest might be valid but throwing-in these makes the whole post less valuable:

- traffic might take your site down: it's never going to happen, although I understand why one would hope so

- SSH attacks: change your default port

- shellshock: you use or used CGI scripts in the last decade?

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#60

Post by ipaddr »

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…

hostgator would have given him a reseller account for 8 dollars or 4 for just an account. No admin needed.
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