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Comment by andrewmcwatters | Hacker News Reader

...are you averse to just doing this stuff over a cheap VPS? Here's an affiliate link if you're interested.

    1 GB RAM KVM VPS
    1x vCPU Core
    1 GB RAM
    20 GB SSD
    2 TB Bandwidth
    Price: $10.96/Year

https://my.racknerd.com/aff.php?aff=2502&pid=912

I don't work for Racknerd, but my business uses them for our clients. Most of them have low-end requirements. I mean that's less than $1/month right there.

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  2 TB Bandwidth

That's 2TB/mo. Pretty sweet deal for $10/yr.

The problem is, having a server on the internet is painful because you have to be constantly on guard for patches - if not you'll get hacked sooner than later.

Debian with unattended-upgrades and a [weekly] scheduled restart has worked for me for a long time.

It should basically be a prompt with a default of Y on first-time setup at this point.

You are getting some pushback but you are not wrong. I thought I was being pretty careful with my DO droplet but just last weekend discovered that it had been hacked and was consorting with mysterious IP addresses in Russia and Brazil.

This was on a box that was firewalled and ssh was locked down. It was running an older kernel - that was probably my downfall.

I immediately shut down and rebuilt the droplet with a more modern kernel. It wasn't too hard because my site is (mostly) static with a simple custom service but is very discouraging to find that somebody has damaged your home project just to (I assume) make a small amount of money.

patches for what? ssh? the service i am running? the linux kernel, but only for remote exploitable issues, of which there have been how many?

seriously, it's not that hard to keep a server uptodate

This fear is way overblown - at least for the basic operating system. Web apps are much more risky. Sandbox them thoroughly.

What?

Wait what, 11 USD per YEAR? How.

https://lowendbox.com/

Lowendbox has lots of cheap shared VPS providers. For small projects that's all you need.

Run iostat -c 1 and keep an eye on %steal column. IME these cheap VPS cannot be used for anything where response time is a factor. It's fine for static content if you put cloudflare CDN in front of it.

Low volume, low resource usage is definitely the best use case for these things. Yeah, you can get a bit more out of them with CDNs or maybe even just some caches.

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