Is Setting Up a VPS Worth It? | Hacker News Reader

Is Setting Up a VPS Worth It?

marcospereira.me

34 pointsthisismyswamp53 comments

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.

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.

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.

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.

+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.

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.

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.

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.

Quick comment on best method for doing a total manual backup/clone of a VM and moving it to another (whether other provider, downsizing, upsizing, etc.)?

a link or a couple of words would be great -- might save hours.

I’d strongly recommend taking frequent (automated) full backups if not using config management. With config management, you can maybe get away with only backing up application data. The best way to do it is to use something like rsync/borg in combination with ZFS/Btrfs. The idea is to take a snapshot of the filesystem and then back up the snapshot, which handles any consistency problems.

For low load systems, just using rsync/Borg by itself may be enough. The advantage of Borg is incremental, deduplicated backups.

I personally use borgmatic (which is a wrapper over Borg, that is nicer to configure). It comes with a fairly decent starting config: https://torsion.org/borgmatic/docs/how-to/set-up-backups/

Since you mentioned both rsync and snapshot: rsnapshot is a tool that exists.

rsnapshot is not what I meant by snapshots. I meant filesystem level snapshots that are atomic. It is an alternative to rsync/Borg, but it does not handle consistency properly (similar to rsync/Borg). It does not solve the snapshotting part of the problem.

So should I just use dd or something? Or can I actually just rsync from one root to another and that will capture all of the dependencies, nginx config, literally everything? GPT-4 tells me I can just shut off everything that might change the file system in source (nginx sshd etc.) then literally rsync from root to root with

sudo rsync -aAXv --exclude-from=exclude-list.txt --delete --numeric-ids --rsync-path="sudo rsync" / user

(the exclude list is just /dev /proc /sys /tmp /run /mnt /media /lost+found).

At a certain point you start to wonder if saving the 50 bucks a month is even worth it....

Yes just rsync should work if you are stopping everything on the first system. The second system should be completely switched off. If you can just mount the drive, that’s the way to go.

No, don't think so -- I would be going from one digital ocean VM to another. So the target machine will be in operation. I honestly might just leave it and think of some other use for the server to justify keeping it running in current state.

Thanks for explaining this though - really appreciate it.

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.

I realize Ansible is kinda slow and can be flaky, and wouldn't use it for 500 servers. However, for one beginner VPS I think it's fine.

The fact that it's not hermetic and perfectly reproducible is a major problem for a fleet, but for single user it's a benefit. It offers a graceful migration path from a snowflake server to a managed server, and still works even if you can't manage to do 100% of the config automatically.

While learning ansible is great, it’s easy enough just to put your configuration in cloud-init.

I don’t think there is a VPS provider that doesn’t use it.

What about post init? Ansible can be run regularly for maintenance patching too.

Why is cloud-init so hard to find? You just made me learn about it, and it seems like the obvious thing to use for VPS initialization.

Shouldn't the hosting provider have pointed me to it from the start? So weird!

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.

It's all clusters encapsulated in bastions now.

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.

Shared hosting is also a great option for small projects.

It can be very cheap and if you stick to static HTML or PHP, deployment is as simple as a SCP or FTP upload.

Plus you don't need to worry about configuring a VPS or keeping up with security updates.

What is shared hosting exactly? Cheaper VPS services are already shared, with the server being a virtual machine on shared hardware.

Serverless has too much vendor lock-in and is hard to reproduce locally for development.

A VPS takes some time to set up but over time can offset a lot of cost - keep in mind hosting is an ongoing expense, and handholding services can cost over 2x more (I would even say easily 10x more).

> you can always move to a VPS at that point

Then why not start there?

If you want your own VPS but don't want to do it on hard mode, I highly recommend Piku: https://piku.github.io/

It'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.

What does it do? Does it work with PowerShell?

I'm always reticent on these things because there's little assurance on how long it will be maintained.

I appreciate when people give me code that I understand and would have taken me longer to figure out on my own - but a complex non-standard tool is harder to adopt.

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.

Caddy Server[1] has automatic HTTPS. Makes this much easier.

[1}: https://caddyserver.com/

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.

‘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.

We don't need many though, we need one that is easy to understand and works well. Perhaps you could share about your favorite?

And jumping into the VPS world, I have not encountered any of these - although I have tried to learn as much as I could. So the fact that it wasn't obvious to me that I should have used some simple tool is saying something about how easy these are to find!

Takes like 30 minutes to set one up and they're cheap. So, yes.

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.

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.

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.

Go on lowendspirit.com there are plenty of VPS with no hassle.

I just added lowendspirit.com to my bookmarks bar, thanks

Can you expand on this with personal examples? For example, where were you getting VPS's with Bitcoin?

I don't use BTC but buyvm.net accepts crypto through coinpayments, whatever that is.

prgmr.net (now tornadovps) accepts payment by check or money order, https://tornadovps.com/documentation/make-payment

I had trouble getting a CC payment to work with another small VPS host, and they let me pay in cash (literal currency through international mail), but maybe that doesn't count since I was an existing customer they were familiar with, not a new sign-up. But if you're trying to run stuff on VPS's and you don't have any existing hosting relationships and you're trying to pay with BTC, that sounds odd.

Thank you, I will check them out, I think I just googled VPS and went with the top results.

As someone who regularly sound up temporary servers in Digital Ocean, I have no idea what you're talking about. There has been absolutely no change whatsoever in how it works in the last 10 years or so.

Agreed. I regularly use dozens (yes, dozens) of VPS vendors all over the world and never ran into this problem. Maybe this guy is signing up for a new account using an Iranian IP address and credit card a from blackhatforums.com.

Have you tried doing so with a new account? Or 10yo account?

Both.

Well then maybe they all started flagging my VPN IP? But i was willing to do cc payment and phone verification. DO never created my account but OVH and one other place took my money and put me on hold for like a week until I needed the box no more.

Virtual machine on my always on desktop machine has replaced VPS for me.

Inside virtual machines, there are rootless containers managed by systemd.

I was surprised at how much energy my always on desktop machine uses. I’ve set it to sleep now, and host my desired vms/containers on an intel NUC. 20w vs 200w idle!

Same here. My NUC eats around 18W when idle, which translates to ~58 Euros a year in electricity costs. (serves mostly as a NAS for Plex) 10x that in costs would be quite significant, and my desktop idles easily above 100W. (Ryzen 5 3600 and GTX 1650Super)

When I'm productive, I get to around 0.5-0.8€ a day of electricity costs with the PC, and gaming for just a few hours occasionally puts me above 1€/day.

My real killer is lab machines. It’s not worth it to pay more for more power efficient machines with a lot of RAM, but it is worth it to automate turning them on and off when I’m done! I’ve noticed a pretty big reduction in consumption having things sleep or shut themselves off.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com