Want to learn by doing. Best VPS and best VPS setup material?

j6ck

Hi all,

I’m coming from a shared hosting background where everything is managed for me, I just upload files and connect to the database.

I’m now looking to move beyond that and delve a bit deeper into the land of networking, infrastructure, DevOps side through self-hosting and (hopefully) understand it all better.

I’m after affordable, yet powerful VPS (Am I too late to the party?). I’ve did a bit of research and came up with the following, be good to get your thoughts.

Hostinger with student discount
£195.55 for 24 months
£8.15 / month

• 2 vCPU cores
• 8GB RAM
• 100GB SSD NVMe
• 8TB bandwidth
• 1gbit network speed

OVH
£90.58 for 12 months
£7.55 / month

• 4 vCores
• 8GB RAM
• 75GB SSD NVMe
• Unlimited bandwidth
• 1gbit network speed

Contabo
£107.73 / 24 months
£4.48 / month

• 4 vCores
• 8GB RAM
• 100GB SSD NVMe
• Unlimited traffic (fair use)
• 200mbit network speed

One.com
£119.868 / year
£9.99 / month

• 4 vCPU
• 8 GB RAM
• 200 GB NVMe SSD
• Unlimited data traffic
• Bandwidth 1 Gbit/s

What do you think of these options?
Any better alternatives (especially providers known for great uptime and the 1gbit network speed) etc,

Also if you know any good learning resources (books, courses, YouTube channels/vids etc.) it would be much appreciated.

Also as I want to improve my understanding, are there any practical challenges/problems you recommend/think are valuable so I can try to solve as to learn by doing?

Thanks in advance, any and all advice is really appreciated!

Saragoldfarb

Take a look at green cloud if you willing to pay yearly. Lots of locations to pick from, specs mostly the same at maybe 45/y.

No doubt it'll outperform all of the above, + chill people.
https://greencloudvps.com/billing/store/budget-kvm-sale

forest

What kind of workloads will you be running? What do you need it to be "powerful" for?

j6ck

@forest said:
What kind of workloads will you be running? What do you need it to be "powerful" for?

So I have a few domains I’d want to hook up to the VPS, I have lots of side projects sitting idle in docker containers that I’d want to deploy. They use for example PHP, MariaDB, Node, Deno, web sockets, python. My only plan currently is I’d want to front everything with Caddy server as my reverse proxy so everything goes though there. As I say I am extremely new to this, so want to understand the best OS to use, tooling etc, I don’t want any lag that I read someone said they experienced with the 200mbit. One side project i want to explore is live streaming like twitch, so I want fast network speeds etc.

Also thoughts on LuxVPS?

Thanks

j6ck

@Saragoldfarb said:
Take a look at green cloud if you willing to pay yearly. Lots of locations to pick from, specs mostly the same at maybe 45/y.

No doubt it'll outperform all of the above, + chill people.
https://greencloudvps.com/billing/store/budget-kvm-sale

Ooo this does look good however before making a purchase, I always go in trustpilot. It seems across the board most VPS providers have quite low scores. Why is this? Thanks

Saragoldfarb

@j6ck said:

@Saragoldfarb said:
Take a look at green cloud if you willing to pay yearly. Lots of locations to pick from, specs mostly the same at maybe 45/y.

No doubt it'll outperform all of the above, + chill people.
https://greencloudvps.com/billing/store/budget-kvm-sale

Ooo this does look good however before making a purchase, I always go in trustpilot. It seems across the board most VPS providers have quite low scores. Why is this? Thanks

Its usually only the ones not satisfied who will leave a review.

They've been chosen as top provider 2025 of LET which should account for something.

https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/216378/provider-poll-2025-the-results/p1

oloke

Hi @j6ck

I can recommend a few youtube channels I used to watch couple years ago.
Personally I mostly learned devops stuff in a homelab (not on a VPS), but I believe at least some videos could still be useful:
- Jim's Garage (video on caddy)
- Christian Lempa (video on caddy)
- LearnLinuxTV - he has some nice playlists with guides on linux and devops
- Jeff Geerling - mostly older videos, especially devops-related playlists like one about ansible, kubernetes - they may be a bit outdated now tho
- NetworkChuck - some videos are quite useful, but i was never a big fan of the videos style

Regarding the VPS choice, we (onidel) can offer you a VPS in multiple locations. The network speed is 1Gbps and we focus on providing good reliability and uptime.
Please feel free to DM me if interested. If you are a student, we could likely offer a custom discount.
You can check our trustpilot page here:
https://www.trustpilot.com/review/onidel.com

Otherwise, I believe the best one out of your listed options would be OVH.

@j6ck said: My only plan currently is I’d want to front everything with Caddy server as my reverse proxy so everything goes though there.

Caddy is a great choice imo. It's really easy to configure and offers a lot of features at the same time.

@j6ck said: One side project i want to explore is live streaming like twitch, so I want fast network speeds etc.

I see what you mean, however I don't think you'll necessarily need very fast network speeds for this. 1Gbps is pretty much the industry standard nowadays on VPS servers, but a single 1080p video stream should only use like 4-6mbps.

tzuli

Are you looking for any particular location?