Why Everyone Should Have a VPS
Let’s start with why
I love VPSes
There is nothing better than having a computer which feels like yours but – there is no heat, no hardware, no DOS attacks to worry about. It is all controlled for you, in the cloud, and you just get an SSH IP and password to do whatever you want with.
They are great sandboxes, where you can test out bits of FOSS software, exposed to the public by accident or anything – it really doesn’t matter in the grand scheme because again – it’s not your home IP or hardware
I have learnt all sorts from my messing about with them, mainly how to use the Linux CLI, different container systems like docker, and just general Linux knowledge. I would thoroughly encourage any computer tinkerer to have a go and you’d be surprised at how many things you come up with to do on one.
But, I think one of the biggest issues is:
What provider do you use?
Well, I started with HorizonHosting (partner here ), and then started using DigitalOcean for the simplicity of setting up a node, but I was watching a video recently by Tubbo (yes the minecraft youtuber), on his computer channel, where he mentioned he was renting VPSes - on the extreme cheap from him but with pretty incredible specs for the price. So I knew I had to cop and I skipped onto play.hosting to rent a server.
Below I have put a comparison of all of the providers I have used, and one I researched
| Provider | Overall rating | Price (monthly) | Specs | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| HorizonHosting | ⭐️⭐️⭐️ | £4 | 1 core 7950X and 2GB DDR5 RAM | I have used horizon for a VPS and it is generally unremarkable |
| DigitalOcean | ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ | $6 / £4.50 | 1 core, 512MB RAM | Used digital ocean for a while. Reason for high rating is very nice panel and very easy to spin up nodes and access them as well. But overall not the best specs for the price |
| Play.hosting | ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ | £4 | 4 cores AMD EPYC, 8GB RAM | Well I mean it just slaughters every offering in terms of performance, and is completely overkill for some of the stuff I want to do… but when it’s cheaper and better than the others? Why not |
| Racknerd | ??? | Varies but could be $1.80 / £1.31 | 1 core, 1GB RAM, 3TB bandwidth | Seen Racknerd when researching other VPS providers. They are well recommended but their deals come every so often and they would be what at I was looking for, not the base specs (I have put the deal specs to the left). Also they lose points automatically because of a scummy deals page that says you’ve got 20 minutes to order or else they will expire and you go back the next day and the deals are still there |
In case you can’t tell, I chose play.hosting, but it may be a bit overkill for a glorified Tailscale exit node with 1 or 2 other processes. I have not rated RackNerd because I haven’t paid for a server and tested a server with them.
What I use my VPS for
Currently at home I just host my link shortener, shlink (great bit of FOSS software) and a couple of home things (like another Tailscale exit node for holidays) on my mini PC.
For the VPS so far, I have just set up my contact form emailing API on the VPS and will move shlink over… eventually… but have also configured Debian to only allow SSH over the Tailscale network interface, and same for Dockge, which is my compose manager of choice (much better than portainer imo). I am overall really happy with the couple of services I am running on there so far and am looking forward to adding more services when I have the need.