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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

#171

Post by pnathan »

dijit wrote: post #125
ricktdotorg wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [..] If someone identifies as a sysadmin and can't write Python/Perl/Go/Ruby [..] this is the difference between a systems admin and a systems engineer. some folk can't make the jump from sysadmin, despite best intentions and training.

It is a common (new) myth that sysadmins didn’t code. There were some IT technicians who couldn’t code and some operations staff who couldn’t code (and would proudly claim this, for some reason). But tools like ansible, salt, chef and terraform were written by sysadmins. In fact a lot of non-feature code in my companies such as database fencing programs and automated blue/green rollouts has been written by sysadmins.…

What's really interesting is that I've run into a lot of sysadmins who can't/don't code; its a continual surprise to me. Writing Perl to manage a system was just part of the deal back when (dating myself now. :) ).

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#172

Post by pnathan »

jprd wrote: post #151
liotier wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sysadmin long enough and you'll find yourself inadvertently scripting in Bash. A few languages and API later and you'll realize that you may be coding. That is how it went for me...

"DevOps" == *nix admins before IaC I cut my teeth on ancient VAX, AS/400, Solaris, HP-UX and Irix connected via NFS and Fibre SANs. Runbooks became shell scripts, then a DB backend, etc. Chef/Ansible/Puppet/et al all evolved from this practice. At the time I moved on to greener pastures, I left behind a global Enterprise Storage environment that was semi-automated by workflow. Directly descended from ksh/bash and the…

This might be pedantic, but DevOps originated in the idea that ops and devs needed to work very closely together to deliver capabilities. It _then_ turned into a role "cloud sysadmin" and then lately seems to be "build engineer".

Language shifts, man. Weird stuff.

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#173

Post by richardfey »

jaza wrote: post #74
richardfey wrote: post #59

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?

Author here. Sure, maybe successful attacks in those categories are unlikely. But my main point was, so long as I maintain my own VPS, they're still possible, and I'm responsible for defending my box against them. Whereas in SaaS land, I don't even know what physical / virtual boxes the provider has, nor do I care, because I'm not responsible for their security nor for anything else regarding them.

If you have run VPSes for some time, how come you have not learnt and taken some steps to make it less prone to attacks? That's the part I don't find credible enough, or can't share the rationale to include it in this post.

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#174

Post by pcr910303 »

tluyben2 wrote: post #75
pcr910303 wrote: post #67

There was a hype on serverless, so a lot of people here on HN is a bit allergic on them and tell ‘an EC2 instance is all you need’. And it’s not wrong — I’ve seen seriously over-engineered serverless systems with so much AWS-specific code. But a few years passed now a lot more services now provide (almost) lockin-free APIs that are pretty useful for simple. IMO blindly recommending ‘just self host’, a sentiment that…

Blindly, nothing is a good answer; you need to weigh your needs. But so most people blindly grab aws; unlike yourself, I find HN actually almost The AWS & K8s Promotion Team. People swear by this stuff here, even if you don’t need it, at all. They forget that not all startups have million$/year to throw away on devops to handle the bizarre complexity of those solutions while they also just really do not need them (no…

I find the argument that you shouldn’t be using serverless because you don’t have money to throw on devops a bit… strange? Isn’t the big reason on using serverless to avoid spending money and time to managing your own server?

And IMO the lambdas-are-cheap argument is more like that lambdas are expensive, but they multiply to your scale, so it’s super-cheap in small startups. I view lambdas as a starting point for PoCs — they eventually have to move to VPCs, but lambdas are free if it gets no traffic.

And that’s why I’ve mentioned lockin-free APIs: lambdas are terrible if you can’t migrate away from it. But if you can without much effort, it provides pretty good value.

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#175

Post by treesknees »

fouc wrote: post #93

How do y'all run your own personal IRC bouncer without a VPS and without a home server? (no 3rd party SaaS)

You could look at a SaaS offering such as IRCCloud https://www.irccloud.com

I haven't done this but in theory you could use something like AWS Fargate or fly.io to launch a bouncer/irc client. Really anywhere that lets you run a free container should work, if you can secure access to it.

This could be a starting point https://github.com/taylorworthing/docker-irssi

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#176

Post by swiftcoder »

rhizome wrote: post #123
swiftcoder wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 m…

Will they sell you static IPs?

Depends on the provider, but it's not that bad to use a dynamic DNS service for those that don't (or something like a CloudFlare tunnel).

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#177

Post by Sharparam »

ptman wrote: post #120

In case you still find yourself needing more than netlify can offer, you can get a pretty decent free VPS from Oracle: https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/ . Just remember to make backups.

You also have to remember to choose the correct region, as their free offerings are not available everywhere (and they won't tell you which regions have it available before locking you into one).

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#178

Post by adamddev1 »

I find that serverless is often so much slower than my $5 VPS. I like making Next.js apps with backend API routes. When I run them on Vercel they're verrry slow, even once you get past the cold starts. Running it on my own little droplet makes it incredible fast and snappy.

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#179

Post by nonamenoslogan »

I did this a few years ago too. Turned my website in to static content and hosted it on Github Pages. Made all my sub-site project pages in to repos, moved the blog content to Github wiki pages, pointed my domain at it and done and done. I used to spend less than the author, $5 a month for my small VPS, but at the end of the day I realized less can be more and moved it all on to Github.

Re: I don't need a VPS anymore

#180

Post by nonamenoslogan »

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…

Github pages works fine with HTTPS and my personal domain, and has for a couple years now.
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