Is Setting Up a VPS Worth It?

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.<p>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.<p>The upside is that it’s cheap and fast, especially compared to anything “serverless” that chargers per request.

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.<p>Has the cloud killed this skillset? Seems increasingly less common these days.

For small projects I&#x27;d remove the bit about &#x27;saving money&#x27; being a reason to use VPS. If you want to get better at Linux, then by all means. However, if you&#x27;d like to save money, assuming you place any value on your own time, it&#x27;s just not worth it.<p>If your project fits in a &quot;serverless&quot; 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.<p>For the price of $0-5&#x2F;mo* you can deploy whatever you like, without managing the infrastructure. Then you can focus on building whatever it is you wanted to deploy.<p>* 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.

If you want your own VPS but don&#x27;t want to do it on hard mode, I highly recommend Piku: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;piku.github.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;piku.github.io&#x2F;</a><p>It&#x27;s a PaaS you can run on your own VPS and it is literally one command to set it up on a fresh Ubuntu instance. Disclaimer: I help co-maintain Piku.

Pretty lame. You get used to all that stuff if you&#x27;re a regular Linux&#x2F;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.

Caddy Server[1] has automatic HTTPS. Makes this much easier.<p>[1}: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;caddyserver.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;caddyserver.com&#x2F;</a>

Any thoughts on ufw? I usually disable that and just make sure that I don&#x27;t have unneeded ports open. I configure iptables manually if needed.

‘Setting up’? There are so many scripts and tools etc to just run one command to have whatever you need. There are services that will do it for you if you enter the ip and key. Not sure how anyone would spend more than 1 minute on ‘setting up’. Yes, it’s worth it, because it takes no time flat and VPSs these days are reliable and very cheap compared to cloud offerings.

Takes like 30 minutes to set one up and they&#x27;re cheap. So, yes.

I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s worth it in terms of time. Maintaining the established system or adding a new feature is always costly in time. I think it&#x27;s just fun as a hobby.

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.<p>Just get a gcp,azure or aws compute instance. Hassle is all you&#x27;ll get with VPS these days.<p>I can&#x27;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.

Virtual machine on my always on desktop machine has replaced VPS for me.<p>Inside virtual machines, there are rootless containers managed by systemd.

I manage my homelab VPS that’s on the cloud with Ansible. Pretty cool but leaning toward migration to Salt