Live data from Hacker News

I don't need a VPS anymore

greenash.net.au

91–100 of 197 posts

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#91
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…

I'm in the metro area around Seattle (across the sound), and my CenturyLink bonded pair syncs at 92M/15M (it was 87M/11M but it mysteriously changed last November; pricing tier is 80M/unspecified). Although there are a lot of places where the speeds are what you quoted, if they'll install for you at all. It always shocks people when I quote my speeds though... but Comcast won't service my property even though they service my neighbors and are on the poll. My county's PUD has a reasonable fiber program, but the install costs are too high / too much hassle because I'd need to trench down a long driveway to the street.

Anyway, the speeds are OK, but PPPoE is terrible (and I hear they run PPPoE over fiber around here too), and at least my Remote Terminal has no battery, only utility power and utility power on this side of the sound doesn't have a lot of nines. I've got a LTE hotspot to failover to, but the cell towers get iffy when the utility power goes out too.

Anyway, I feel your pain. I run servers in my house, but I have to run a VPS for my 'important' stuff.

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#92
post #68
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's up to you when you think a traditional server back-end is still warranted, there are certainly still cases where it makes sense. But if all you need is a contact form, then I'd argue that it doesn't make sense! Yes, I agree, Netlify Forms is a rip-off, if you need more than the free limit of 100 submissions per month (which personally I don't, but of course many people do). But there are many other options for s…

The thing is I only picked on forms off the top of my head. There's a ton of functionality in your average client site which I can't imagine JAMstack catering for without it costing a lot more than hosting it on a VPS. JAMstack seems to cater for the painting by numbers model of web development but that's only a small fraction of what clients need. The JAMstack equivalent of a typical WordPress site, I imagine, would…

That’s right. Plus you miss out on control, functionality, optimization, flexibility on the dev side and predictability and simplicity on the business side. It turns things upside down and for the type of work we do these are exactly the wrong tradeoffs.

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#94
If it (the SaaS way) works for you, great, keep doing it that way. With the use-case and math in the article it seems like the most rational choice.

For me, the sysadmin skills learned from running VPSs have come in handy and have gotten me jobs.

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#95

I felt sad when I read all the "No more ..."'s then saw the cartoon and text parodying religion in a pejorative context and was done reading.

I think you are misinterpreting the joke... it isn't pejorative against or parodying religion, it is making fun of tech companies handling security by just confessing security sins and then thinking that is enough.

That's a meta joke itself towards the concept of confession

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#96
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will always be sysadmins in the same way there will always be Fortran programmers. There are benefits to the old way of doing things, but those benefits are of shrinking relevance.

Who do you think runs the cloud you run on? (Hint: sysadmins)

Yes. As Sartre said: The cloud is just other people's hell.

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#97
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…

> 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.

There are residential ISPs offering symmetrical gigabit fiber in a pretty good chunk of metro Seattle. I lived in an apartment tower so had access to Wave-G (previously CondoNet)'s insanely good gigabit offering, but friends who rented houses in the suburbs also had residential fiber.

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#98

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 d…

I would note that every single company I've had in the last 8 years has essentially been replacing sysadmins with infra-knowledgable programmers working with AWS services (who might have been sysadmins in a past life). No one in the engineering org was hired who couldn't program. IT's "System Engineers" were aimed towards "you need to write code to do your job with LDAP/AD/Okta/etc". If someone identifies as a sysadmin and can't write Python/Perl/Go/Ruby, I would... strongly suggest changing that, because I think _that_ has become mandatory for forward looking shops, if not normal shops.

Also. With respect to cost.

AWS costs me something under $1/mo to host my static page on S3 and have my domain point to it. I don't have much traffic. If I did, I could sort that out with relevant tooling; it's still wildly cheap vs compute. The FaaS model (although I personally loathe it) is also reported to be very cost-effective for certain classes of problems.

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#99
post #91
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…

I'm in the metro area around Seattle (across the sound), and my CenturyLink bonded pair syncs at 92M/15M (it was 87M/11M but it mysteriously changed last November; pricing tier is 80M/unspecified). Although there are a lot of places where the speeds are what you quoted, if they'll install for you at all. It always shocks people when I quote my speeds though... but Comcast won't service my property even though they se…

> I hear they run PPPoE over fiber around here too

Yeah, the old CenturyLink fiber installs have PPPoE. New installs under the Quantum brand are plain DHCP, but still on VLAN 201. (Perhaps to discourage people from accidentally plugging in their router wrong? Not sure.)

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#100
I run a kubernetes cluster on GKE for my dynamic tools, and host some other stuff on S3. Eventually I'll get all over to the big G.

I got very tired of the VPS/ec2 node "hassle". Too much grief, too little payoff. What do I need a "true" node for? Not much. I know Kube well enough it's a straight shot over for me, with a massive capability increase. (And boy, do I pay for it. But it does give me a nice playground @.@).

Post reply on HN