"Get yourself a cheap VPS near you and make sure you get two IPv4 addresses."
If you're going to rent a server, why not just put your stuff there?
If you're going to rent a server, why not just put your stuff there?
It's also a lot easier to show off demo projects like this - you don't need to copy everything to your VPS and figure out how to run it, you just need to have it running on your local machine (e.g. your development laptop) and let other people access that. Obviously that's not a great system for anything long-term, but if you just want to show a friend something you've made, it's quite useful.
Presumably the pi is just running Minecraft
A $5 VM from Digitalocean has 1vCPU and 1GB of RAM.
The VPS power bill is already paid with its price. For the Raspberry you have to pay the power bill.
Here in Germany we now reach 40 Euro Cents/kWh. 5 Watts 24/7 are 17.52 Euro/Year 10 Watts 24/7 are 35.04 Euro/Year. The Raspberry is somewhere between.
That is the reason why I replaced my Dell t30 Server with two Contabo VPS servers. I also don't have to worry about my ISP screwing up my connection.
Buy a high-endurance card or simply use external media if you have I/O heavy services you run on it.
> The VPS power bill is already paid with its price. For the Raspberry you have to pay the power bill.
True, but that cost is so small. Not sure if those German prices are accurate for most places, but where I live, it's nowhere near 0.40 EUR /kWh, so the cost of electricity per year is marginal at worst, unnoticeable at best.
> That is the reason why I replaced my Dell t30 Server with two Contabo VPS servers. I also don't have to worry about my ISP screwing up my connection.
Taking a look at Contabo (never seen them before), it seems their "Cloud VPS" is all virtual CPUs (not dedicated ones), so not really comparable.
* As someone else said, overclocking helped, and I had a reasonable passive cooling case to help there.
* I used Paper instead of the normal Minecraft server, and I ended up spending a decent amount of time optimising the configuration. Paper by default comes with a bunch of optimisations, I enabled some more, although I also disabled some that were interfering with the more technical areas of Minecraft that I enjoy more.
* Whenever things started lagging, I went on a killing spree for our main farms, and that tended to work well enough. Most of our contraptions were turned off by default, or designed not to be too laggy. I also restarted the server every night, which worked reasonably well as a sort of ultimate GC.
If I were going to do it again more seriously, I'd probably get a cheap mini PC and use that instead, but for what it was - me and a friend rediscovering Minecraft after having not played it probably in about 5-10 years - the pi4 held up pretty damn well.
One problem with these VPS is contention for physical CPU between multiple tenants. Lots of CPU context-switching. Kills performance. You can get dedicated-CPU VPS, but at that point you're basically renting a fraction of a real server and the prices tend to be high.
A $100-$150 old x86 workstation or server off Ebay will do even better (I run several things, including a Minecraft server, on mine, and it performs great for all of it), but your power use will be much higher than with a Pi.
This is also why dedicated instances are usually way better for performance-sensitive hosting compared to beefier VPS instances.
1: https://virmach.com/cheap-kvm-linux-vps-windows-vps/
I only need it's IP address and network, nothing else, to setup a stateless reverse proxy. Which I guess is the best use case for such VPS.
Are they good?
Keep in mind, you get what you paid for. Many low cost VPS vendors are also using low cost IDCs to host their hardware. Some of those IDCs might be heavily sanctioned by other online services (say, Google will always want to verify if you're a human if the IP of the VPS lands on the sanctioned range).
Other than that, they're fine. My VPS with Virmach has been up since 464 days ago, I consider it stable enough (again) for my application.
If you're interested in low spec VPS, I would point you to Low End Talk (https://lowendtalk.com/), which is a forum for low cost VPS vendor and consumers.
If you value the privacy / integrity of other data then that also is more protected.