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Comment by xandrius

10 hours ago

Why is everyone so afraid to get a $5/mo Ubuntu/Debian VPS, install nginx and call it a day?

Then you can even run multiple projects off the same server.

34 comments

xandrius

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kennu  9 hours ago

It means you take responsibility of maintaining the server forever, i.e. dealing with TLS certificates, SSH keys, security updates, OS/package updates, monitoring, reboots when stuck, redeploy when VPS retired, etc. Usually things work fine for a year or two and then stuff starts to get old and need attention and eat your time.

  • gbuk2013  1 hour ago

    As someone who runs a such a VPS this is all a non-issue. Running HTTP service is so trivial that once I set it up I don’t even spend an hour in a year maintaining it. Especially with Caddy which takes care of all the certs for you.

    And this is also bearing in mind that I complicate my setup a bit by running the different sites in docker containers with Caddy acting as a proxy.

    With storage volumes for data and a few Bash scripts the whole server becomes throw-away that can be rebuilt in minutes if I really need to go there.

    And for sure any difficulty and ops overhead pales in comparison to having to manage tooling and dependencies for a typical simple JS web-app. :)

  • fnoef  7 hours ago

    Oh no! Issuing SSL certificates! The horror!

    I really doubt that people who can’t install an ssh key should be able to practice software engineering. Sometimes, I think that software engineering should be a protected profession like other types of engineering. At least it will filter out the people who can’t keep their OS up to date.

    • kennu  6 hours ago

      This is not about how easy or difficult it is to issue TLS certificates, to configure SSH keys or to update the OS. It's about having to actively maintain them yourself in every possible situation until eternity, like when TLS versions are deprecated, SSH key algorithms are quantum-hacked, backward-incompatible new OS LTS versions are released, and so on. You will always have new stuff come up that you need to take care of.

      6 replies →

  • mvdtnz  1 hour ago

    This is the kind of stuff a software develop should have absolutely no problem managing. It's crazy to me that so many software developers hate the idea of maintaing a computer.

  • wouldbecouldbe  6 hours ago

    just ask claude to do all that :), he is excellent and installing & managing new servers and making sure all security patches are updated. Just be careful if its a high risk project.

  • ipsento606  6 hours ago

    certbot and ssh keys are things you set up once

    I haven't rebooted my DO droplets in something like 5 years. I don't monitor anything. None of them have been "retired".

  • SoftTalker  7 hours ago

    vs. trusting someone else to do all that for you, and do you then verify that it gets done properly?

    • kennu  7 hours ago

      When buying the infrastructure as a managed cloud service, yes, I trust that they've got people handling it better than I could myself. The value proposition is that I don't even see the underlying infrastructure below a certain level, and they take care of it.

  • shimman  9 hours ago

    This is extremely easy with tools like dokploy tho... I use dokploy locally to manage all my VPSs + home server. Truly good stuff and I don't believe your quip at the end, it feels like poisoning the open source waters for consolidated anti democratic cloud platforms.

    It's way way way way easier managing a basic VPS that can be highly performant for your needs. If this was 2010, I'd agree with you but tooling and practices have gotten so much better over the last decade (especially the last 5 years).

    • kennu  8 hours ago

      Maybe you're right - I've never tried dokploy, but from documentation it sounds like mostly a deployment, monitoring and alerting tool. For me the problem has always been that once you get the alert (or something just stops working), a human needs to react to it and make things work again. In cloud services you mostly pay for them providing the human, and in self-hosting you're the human.

      I can see though that today's AI models could eventually replace the human in the loop and truly automatically fix every possible situation.

      4 replies →

kami23  10 hours ago

I just did this over at Hetzner and Claude admins it for me so I don't need to learn the CLI or anything, describe the proxying I want, and it setups up a bunch of small side project pages for me.