[HN Gopher] Is Setting Up a VPS Worth It?
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Is Setting Up a VPS Worth It?
Author : thisismyswamp
Score : 18 points
Date : 2023-03-13 13:58 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (marcospereira.me)
(TXT) w3m dump (marcospereira.me)
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
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| bosch_mind wrote:
| I manage my homelab VPS that's on the cloud with Ansible. Pretty
| cool but leaning toward migration to Salt
| badrabbit wrote:
| From what I tried last year, the old VPS days are over. Anti-
| fraud has ruined it. Having valid payment and email is not
| enough, and even with that it will take days to provision one. I
| tried digitalocean, OVH and several big names and wasted a ton of
| money for a VPS I needed right away.
|
| Just get a gcp,azure or aws compute instance. Hassle is all
| you'll get with VPS these days.
|
| I can't believe it is so hard to pay someone to provision a VM.
| They need my phone, i have to go through approvals and so much
| other bs. 4-5 years ago I was able to get a VPS and a domain with
| some bitcoin within a few hours. Now some places have the
| audacity to ask for ID verification.
| zamnos wrote:
| http://www.rapidseedbox.com still accepts BTC for payment
| (according to
| https://help.rapidseedbox.com/en/articles/1088663-how-to-
| pay...), if that's your jam.
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| Go on lowendspirit.com there are plenty of VPS with no hassle.
| neets wrote:
| I just added lowendspirit.com to my bookmarks bar, thanks
| neets wrote:
| Can you expand on this with personal examples? For example,
| where were you getting VPS's with Bitcoin?
| stonewall wrote:
| Do people not use Linux anymore? General Linux admin skills were
| common knowledge when I was in university ~10 years ago, and many
| people ran Linux as their primary OS. Most of my friends had
| their own VPS with little pet websites.
|
| Has the cloud killed this skillset? Seems increasingly less
| common these days.
| expertentipp wrote:
| It's all clusters encapsulated in bastions now.
| pictur wrote:
| I don't think it's worth it in terms of time. Maintaining the
| established system or adding a new feature is always costly in
| time. I think it's just fun as a hobby.
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| Pretty lame. You get used to all that stuff if you're a regular
| Linux/Un*x user. Set up your favorite container image or
| orchestraton playbook (I use Ansible) and you are good to go when
| you spin up a new VPS.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| Caddy Server[1] has automatic HTTPS. Makes this much easier.
|
| [1}: https://caddyserver.com/
| pornel wrote:
| If you go that route, I also recommend using something like
| Ansible. Unfortunately, it's more things to learn and more to set
| up, but it's worth it long term.
|
| The problem is that you will set up your first VPS by spending
| hours installing packages and tweaking configs by hand. But
| eventually you will need to upgrade the OS, or switch to bigger
| hardware, or change VPS providers. And then it'll be a nightmare
| to recreate all that snowflake config elsewhere without
| forgetting some detail.
|
| The upside is that it's cheap and fast, especially compared to
| anything "serverless" that chargers per request.
| floatinglotus wrote:
| I can't imagine using Ansible to configure a single server,
| seems like the wrong tool IMO.
|
| Why not something like docker-compose and put all of the config
| bits into a single repo?
|
| That way you can clone the repo on a new server and simply
| rebuild the containers.
| lmarcos wrote:
| How do you setup sshd or the ufw, or fail2ban... with Docker?
| I do see the point on running nginx and a Python apps using
| Docker, though.
| Macha wrote:
| How do you setup sshd with ansible? You need some form of
| access for initial provisioning, Ansible doesn't fix that
| either.
|
| Sure, you can take that manually configured sshd and
| replace it with something managed by ansible _after_ the
| initial setup, but not before.
| bravetraveler wrote:
| +1 for Ansible, or really any tool of choice.
|
| Even well-written scripts will do! Just know - if you go with
| writing your own, you're doing something someone probably
| already did as a module.
|
| With proficiency Ansible is like writing declarative
| pseudocode. Say what you want and a huge library of Python will
| 'make it so'.
|
| Eventually you'll have a library of roles that don't care about
| the operating system, maybe even the provider.
|
| A peer comment mentions _docker-compose_. That 's fine, but I
| prefer Ansible -- the DSL can be made very similar with a
| role... and it's far more capable. Like preparing the runtime.
| zamnos wrote:
| Can I interest you in some Docker? If you're not using docker,
| and still have an _extensive_ pile of Ansible scripts (you
| still need some, just not as much as before), it would really
| be worth your time to investigate how those scripts can be
| simplified using newer technology.
| lmarcos wrote:
| Ansible is useful for stuff like installing openssh on the
| server and setting up a secure sshd config file. Or setting
| up ufw. You can do more, of course. I don't think Docker is
| suitable for that kind of stuff.
| ratorx wrote:
| I don't think Ansible is a good solution. It's kinda a meh
| middle ground between reproducible system (which is hard to
| actually do well with Ansible) and simply using
| backups/snapshots. Ansible introduces a lot of overhead, but
| does not provide particularly strong reproducibility
| guarantees. There's no really advantage to treating config
| differently from data unless you want to use revision control
| (and simple backups are not enough) or have some tricky config
| generation to do.
|
| In a lot of cases, especially if you are gonna be moving
| between machines, rather than scaling horizontally, your
| machines don't need to be reproducible. You can just restore a
| backup and tweak the new stuff (network configuration, etc).
| This gets rid of an entire class of complexity and lets you
| just do things once (rather than figuring something out and
| encoding into config management DSL).
|
| If you actually need reproducibility, then it makes sense to go
| all the way. Something like NixOS provides stronger guarantees
| than Ansible. There is definitely a larger learning curve than
| Ansible though.
| erenst wrote:
| We used to manage 500+ servers with Ansible for almost 10
| years. It was a nightmare.
|
| With so many servers Ansible script would ocassionally fail on
| some servers (weird bugs, network issues, ...). Since the
| operations weren't always atomic we couldn't just re-run the
| script. it required fixing things manually.
|
| Thanks to this and emergency patches/fixes on individual
| servers, we ended up with slightly different setup on the
| servers. This made debugging and upgrading a nightmare. Can
| this bug happen on all the server or just this one because it
| has a different minor version of package 'x'?
|
| We switched to NixOS. It had a steep learning curve for us,
| with lots of doubts if this was the right decision. Converting
| all the servers to NixOS was a huge 2-year task.
|
| Having all the servers running same configuration that is
| commited to GitHub, fully reproducable and tested in CI, on top
| of automatic updates of the servers done with GitHub action,
| was worth all the troubles we had with learning NixOS.
|
| This entire blog post could be a NixOS config.
| jacob019 wrote:
| Any thoughts on ufw? I usually disable that and just make sure
| that I don't have unneeded ports open. I configure iptables
| manually if needed.
| iansinnott wrote:
| For small projects I'd remove the bit about 'saving money' being
| a reason to use VPS. If you want to get better at Linux, then by
| all means. However, if you'd like to save money, assuming you
| place any value on your own time, it's just not worth it.
|
| If your project fits in a "serverless" environment use Vercel or
| Netlify for free. If not, use the Fly free tier or pay a small
| amount of money per month. Use Supabase or Planescale for the db.
|
| For the price of $0-5/mo* you can deploy whatever you like,
| without managing the infrastructure. Then you can focus on
| building whatever it is you wanted to deploy.
|
| * The asterisk is of course that these services usually cost
| quite a bit more if your usage goes beyond the free tier, but you
| can always move to a VPS at that point.
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