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Comment by simpaticoder | Hacker News Reader

Rent a $5/mo Linux VPS and be happy. I think more people should do this because what you learn (and you'll learn a lot) is the foundation of everything else. Do this even if you are a programmer used to deploying to sophisitcated CI/CD stacks and k8s. The tight resource constraints (e.g. 1G RAM) are good for you - they make you think, and take care what you run and when you run it. Learn to setup ssh on both ends; learn to tail auth.log; learn how to write bash library functions; learn to run podman if you must; learn to update your OS; learn about tmux and htop and a 1000 other things. Literally all of these skills are applicable to everything else - they are elementary. If you ship it you own it and if you think you can avoid learning this stuff you're wrong. Take heart: the stakes are very low so you can make mistakes. The worst that will happen is hackers take over your VPS and ddos someone for a bit and you have to wipe and start over.

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I went this route and got taken over by hackers multiples times. It was very worth it. I got taken over by hackers because my password for ssh was "mars". Me and my little brother were sharing it and wanted an easy password (yeah we have ssh keys now).

Anyways, we both learnt a lot (htop tmux etc) . I'm always jealous that he got to learn everything earlier than me. But if he's not better than me then I consider myself a failure wrt being an older brother.

The only drawback is that this doesn't work if you want to do ai stuff. For those use cases I rent a machine on paper space for a cheap hourly rate.

>I got taken over by hackers

I'm a little sad I never was. I started with the Linode "hardening linux guide" and so had a firewall and disabled ssh passwords from day 1. I still have fun looking at the failed attempts on 22 and 443. My server gets so many weird requests, and they used to crash the server. A few iterations and that stopped happening.

Oh, another thing that's worth learning: how to acquire and refresh a Lets Encrypt TLS cert via the ACME protocol. Doing this requires interesting confluence of skills and tools - you must carve out a vestigial http route in your server, and also configure certbot and cron. And working out the bugs takes a few iterations. (You could install Caddy, but where's the fun in that?!)

Making it all work, from scratch, made me feel happy in the same way that when I watch people rebuild carburetors or who build bookshelves from scratch makes them feel. It's not new, it's not innovative, but its good. And it's always more interesting than you'd ever suspect.

I thought I had been once, and got a very scary email that came from my own domain, claiming to have gotten into my things, and I fully assumed it was the VPS that got hacked. After calming down and raiding the shit out of everything I realized it was just plain old domain spoofing. Both disappointing and terrifying at the same time!

There is a lot of value in learning things the hard way vs the easy way if there is no real significant harm caused, I think. In many cases you learn more or gain a deeper understanding/respect for the topic, which is worth something in its own

I currently host a personal VPN and my website (which includes a static blog, a Rust API, and a Postgres database), all on a $6/m VPS. Being a first-time customer, the service provider offered a 100% bonus on the credit I deposited making it even half as expensive. It probably won't hold up when the site has decent traffic, but for now it's the best money I've spent.

What do you do with the API?

Currently it has only one API route to simultaneously increments the view count in Postgres and returns an HTML badge containing the count. In the future I want to use it for authentication, particularly for admin routes and other stuff to access my private data.

I'm glad I did. All of my websites with domains now run off of a little Droplet running a bodgy bit of software I made called "Run my stuff" it does that, runs my websites, tunnels it through ngnix, and uses CloudFlare to bring it to the internet.

Very simple, but what works, works.

Do you have a link to this 5 dollar service you mention? The ones I knew have risen prices considerably.

linode has a $5/mo plan

I do:

https://www.vultr.com/pricing/

- https://www.linode.com/pricing/#compute-shared

- https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud-compute/

- https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/droplets

also, https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/#Virtual_servers

lots of hosting providers with cheap options these days.

Well, it’s cheap until a badly behaved script starts sending lots of data and Amazon charges your card a huge bill (unless they’ve finally got around to hard price caps?)

None of these 4 providers do hard caps. If a lack of hard caps is your complaint, file it against all of them.

Lightsail instances each include at least 1TB of transfer each month, which is the same as DigitalOcean. Vultr and Linode also charge network overage fees on a per gigabyte basis if you transfer too much. Absolutely, everyone should set up billing alerts on any of these services.

I'm not here to say Lightsail is the absolute best option, just an option.

I was told digitaloceon at least had caps, but you are right, none of them do.

In which case, I’m not using any of them outside of an LLC.

OVH has unmetered VPSs: https://www.ovhcloud.com/en-gb/vps/

I suspect the bandwidth is lower, but that is fair enough.

Tornado VPS (used to be prgmr.com) is another one: https://tornadovps.com/order/main/packages/xen/ For $5 you get 1.25 GiB RAM and 15 GiB SSD.

Started using them for almost 15 years ago when running an SMTP server on home-tier internet connections became less feasible.

I use Linode (now Akamai Cloud). Oddly the "Linode 1GB" plan doesn't seem to have a link - you can find it in the shared cpu section under "Nanode 1GB" https://www.linode.com/pricing/#compute-shared.

The impression I get is that most $5 VPSes are basically the same, although I've really only used Linode. They give you some useful free stuff like an external firewall/router and monitoring (with only 24 hours of history, but that's plenty). Their docs and scripts are really good too if, like me, you're only a dilettante sysadmin.

https://www.hetzner.com/ will give you 2GB for $5

And absurd amounts of traffic

Wow, I may move there. They even have EU only ARM instances with 2 cores and 4GB of RAM for $5/mo, which is amazing value.

I get them from the aggregator https://lowendbox.com when companies offer deals; some have been great, some poor, but all very cheap; I think $14/year has been a decent one.

Although my current one only has 512MB RAM and isn’t enough for Rust to compile Scryer Prolog. Prolog, a language first run on the computers of 1971 and standardised around 1998.

There's also some $1/month and $30/year options if you look hard enough.

The biggest bang for your buck will be with Contabo. I've tried OVH and Cloudfanatic as well, but recently settled on Contabo just because it's cheaper

Is this actually a good idea? Won't you be investing in a lot of obsolete skills?

You have to be trolling

Learning how linux operates, ops is done, networks are configured, firewalls are hardened, processes are monitored, resources are allocated, disks are backed up, ips are assigned, routing tables work, symlinks work, and code is deployed is never going to be an obsolete skill.

Pick whatever amazing heroku, fly, render, replit, next, k8s, nomad, docker, whatever platform you think has abstracted things away to make those skills obsolete and you'll find an entire cohort of our industry dedicated to using those skills to keep those services online, improving how they operate, and writing the literal software that powers them. Do you think docker or k8s could exist without Ops knowledge or systems programmers?

I am not trolling.

My view is that there will be a few very smart people at the companies you mention, doing those things. But most jobs in the tech industry will not require those skills. That's the point of specialization. It is efficient.

You claim that linux, disk backup and routing tables will never be obsolete. Really?

I am curious what your background or specialization is, but I can confirm the skills you learn from Linux, backups, and networking will be applicable now and in the future. The only thing they can do is help make you a better engineer.

I'm an outsider. But sometimes they see things insiders don't, or don't want to. I'm an economist, and in my reading of economic history, I have yet to hear of a skill that always stayed applicable.

How long is always?

Being able to do various forms of maths (e.g. geometry) has been a useful skill for literally millennia.

Being able to drive has been a useful skill for about a century. The number of people who need this skill has probably peaked in developed countries, but is rising globally.

A lot of basic computer and networking technologies have been around since the 70s or even earlier and the pace of change has slowed a lot since then.

I am not convinced. A lot of these things were specialised before these companies took off - with different people doing sysadmin, managing networks, DB admin, programming etc. There was always need for some generalists.

It is also useful to have a deeper understanding of underlying and related systems to you own - it makes it easier to understand problems, to communicate with specialists, etc.

You mentioned you are an economist. Do you think it would be a good idea for someone interested in macroeconomics to decide never to learn any microeconomics at all? Specialisation should be additional knowledge built on a broader base.

> You claim that linux, disk backup and routing tables will never be obsolete. Really?

I would interpret never is "not in your working life" which is a reasonable claim.

Also, underlying skills. We will always need OSes (even if Linux because obsolete), we will always need to backup data, and we will always need to route information. If you have learned one OS, or have experience of backups, or setting up networks it will be much easier to update to the new version.

> You claim that linux, disk backup and routing tables will never be obsolete. Really?

If data exists, backing it up will never go away, and we still use magnetic tape drives for enterprise backup so no, disk backup isn’t going away, not within our lifetimes, and since your concern is the person wasting their time, I’ll assume our lifetimes is a fine timeline to look at.

Linux, and the open source world that exists because of it and GNU, aren’t becoming obsolete. With the steam deck and EVs, and android auto, Linux is deploying more places than ever, and only increasing. Every container you run is Linux, etc. Even windows supports running Linux.

Packet switching, which routing tables are a part of, is literally how the modern day internet is able to exist, IP protocol and all.

Everything you suggested are core to all modern day tech and won’t soon be obsolete, and you’re probably well aware. Perfect troll response with the selected tech you mentioned. Someone else will have to feed you.

These are not obsolete skills.

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