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Moving on from Low End boxes, what was your journey like? Any tips?
Today I took a look at my various VPSes. I realized that I'm paying about 50 USD a month for 10 different LE VPSes (they all have yearly payments of 20 USD here, and 15 there and another 32 there, so it's easy to not see just how much in total, monthly, I've been paying). Total RAM (not including 48GB on the SSDNodes box) is 56GB RAM. Total space is about 4TB. This has made me curious - is it time to move on to dedicated boxes?
What was your own transition like? Did you know what to do, or did you have to prepare? For example, I'm used to paying for a VPS, then choosing which OS (Ubuntu 18 usually), and then going from there. But with a dedicated box, I am able to create my own VPSes, right? I could rent one Hetzner box with 64GB RAM and at least a TB of space and make (for example) 4 VPSes with 16GB each... but how? I'd need 4 IPv4 addresses too... where do I start learning how to do all this? Where and how did you?
Comments
If you need IPs, hetzners might not be your best choice, their IP is expensive. Currently using SYS-1, what I could say is that there is quite a learning curve between VPSes and dedicated, but if you're passionate enough, you will feel quite rewarded. Wh
Worth the effort, if you're willing to learn something new.
when it comes to 50+GB RAM and 10+ cores it may even be worth buying old hardware from some DC and hosting dedi on your own, renting some IPs from your single ISP. depends on the tasks of course. I believe chinese old hardware would be of best price.
you can host a hypervisor even on desktop. btw, maybe it's the best starting point to start practicing
you may want start by reading briefs about technologies you're interested in, it's particular implementations and it's docs in turn. virtualization generally didn't require a PhD in sysadm. here are some keywords to start self-educating: hypervisor, LXC, KVM, libvirt, iptables, NAT, LIR, PA-/PI-IP, RAID, zabbix
You move on from vps to dedicated when you need some resources that you don't get for cheap from vps. It could be high cpu usage or the need for a lot of disk or even just a lot of ram.
You can run VMs on proxmox or there's a lot of other options which you can google.
Although you didn't ask this, you may one day transition from cheap low end vps to the really expensive big boys like aws/azure etc. The costs of hardware are relatively cheap compared to the salary of just a single developer, not to mention entire teams of devs.
I switched to a dedicated recently but didn't get rid of all my vpses. I considered connectivity, possible region outages and just having data on different hardware as my reasons for not putting most eggs in one basket.
Worst thing you can do is host everything on 1 server. What happens when it goes down? Unless you're using to for personal/hobby stuff.
vpses in many location.
dedi in one location.
how
I got rid of several virtual servers and switched to one dedicated server from Hetzner, the AX41-NVME (I also added a 6TB HDD to the config). I'm super happy with it.
what do you do with 10 tiny vps? why do you need multiple IPs?
I run Cloudron on one VPS, 2 different YunoHost installs to use two different main domains for federated apps, one VPS for Caprover for a few apps there that aren't on others, then 3 for LAMP - spread out since the RAM isn't enough, but the price is low, another 2TB backup server using one domain, and 2 others for Presearch nodes...
Those are rookie numbers...
Personally, I moved from low-end VPSs to a low-end dedi, though I've still got a handful of VPSs for things that need to be in a different region. I've got 5 IPs on my dedi, and run a few VPSs on the dedi with their own IP, as well as using docker for smaller services that don't need a dedicated IP. I waited for black friday deals here, because hetzner's and sys/kimsufi's locations weren't a great fit for me, and managed to pick up something in Los Angeles that I'm very happy with.
Search engines are your friend here, there's a million guides for setting up various things and if you're already fairly comfortable with linux it shouldn't be difficult to pick up.
since you are going to switch from many VPS and re-arrange your apps I suggest you to look at Docker containers instead of running many vps you will be much more efficient for managing everything.
This makes very little sense to put all your eggs in one basket, be responsible for the hardware and maintenance, need to spend time on research and learning other processes, and have migrations from yearly to monthly on 10 packages. Your savings is diminished if not outright gone.
It's like you hate having free time.
You need both. Get dedis where a dedi would suit and use VPS for things that they suit. The best part about this is that dedis and vps aren't mutually exclusive.
Hi @scooke!
Jump in and start swimming! Get yourself a cheap dedi and try stuff.
But, don't give up your VPSes just yet. Don't expect to set up anything in production until you are sure you can manage it because your pre-production is well tested.
A big difference between dedis and VPSes (from the sysadmin perspective) might be that, for dedis, sometimes, in order to install a custom OS, you want to use IPMI, iLO, iDRAC, Lantronix Spider KVM over IP or similar. These are a PITA to learn, but you can do it if you go slowly and don't try to get production running immediately. Make sure the dedi you get allows use of IPMI or similar. Not all of them do. Expect to spend hours the first few times.
Old advice is "Never run more than one service on any one machine."
Google for tutorials.
Ask questions here at LET exactly as you are doing now.
Don't get anything for a term longer than monthly. Haha, that one bears repeating: Don't get anything for a term longer than monthly.
Have fun! Dedis are great! Cat's pajamas! 😸
Tom
Thank you everyone who contributed some advice, as well as some terms I can start with.