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It's amazing how much stuff you can pack in a small and super cheap VPS
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It's amazing how much stuff you can pack in a small and super cheap VPS

I was planning to stop self hosting altogether, and had initially migrated some apps to Heroku, which is awesome but would cost quite a lot. Instead, I transferred 3 VPS from GreenCloud (4c8g each) to others and now I have only one small GreenCloud VPS with 2 cores and 4 GB which costs me only $25 per year. So I am still self hosting a few things to save money and on this tiny and ultra cheap server I now have:

  • DynaBlogger, my blogging platform written in Ruby on Rails (will open source it as soon as I can), which runs two processes (web and worker); this alone uses quite a bit of memory
  • Postfactum, a Rails app I am building to manage simple retrospectives at work. Will also open source this when ready
  • Commento, for the comments for my blog (until I finish the commenting feature in DynaBlogger)
  • Actual Budget, a budgeting app similar to YNAB
  • dpaste, a private paste bin
  • kutt, a URL shortner I use quite a bit at the moment
  • SERP bear, an app that allows me to track ranking of some keywords on Google
  • Umami, analytics
  • Wallabag, to save articles for reading later, similar to Instapaper

I am using Dokku to manage these apps (Dokku is absolutely awesome, you should try it), and for each of DynaBlogger/Commento/Postfactum/Dpaste/Kutt/Umami/Wallabag I have a dedicated Postgres container (that's the way Dokku works out of the box; could use a single container for all but I didn't bother); DynaBlogger/Wallabag also have a Redis container each, and DynaBlogger also has a memcached container.

All of this in a ultra cheap VPS with just 2 cores and 4GB of RAM, for just $25/year, and there's 1.9GB of memory still available :smiley:

(ps. no, clearly I will never be able to get rid of self hosting altogether)

Comments

  • The power of Linux, my friend.

  • lol like my ex-girlfriend.. can never decide what they want to do....

  • Then the provider goes deadpool and you lose everything.

    Thanked by 1yoursunny
  • ArkasArkas Moderator

    @sundaymouse said: Then the provider goes deadpool and you lose everything.

    I don't think @greencoludvps is going deadpool...

  • DataRecoveryDataRecovery Member
    edited January 2023

    @vitobotta said:

    At first I was like:

    It's amazing how much stuff you can pack in a small VPS

    But then:

    2 cores and 4GB of RAM

    Thanked by 1yoursunny
  • @Arkas said:

    @sundaymouse said: Then the provider goes deadpool and you lose everything.

    I don't think @greencoludvps is going deadpool...

    No one thought NexusBytes was going to deadpool either. Hosts advertise here just statistically have a much higher chance to deadpool than larger providers.

  • I'm not picking on greencloudvps, I'm just saying that putting all your eggs in one basket has risks, particularly if your eggs are hosted in this market.

  • tjntjn Member

    That's really cool, and is making me rethink how many resources I have dedicated to my own apps.

    May I ask what you use the link shortner for?

  • Great post about the power of Linux! Makes me think of the horsepower and memory in a typical low-end Synology NAS unit are actually lower than your VPS, and it can run tons of apps too. So Linux really is incredible when you think how few resources you need.

  • stonedstoned Member
    edited January 2023

    Glad you're having fun! :) However...

    2 cores and 4 GB is a small VPS? Nope. 128MB is a small VPS. Rails hogs resources. Rails cannot be deployed on a small VPS, which you don't have. You have a pretty beefy VPS there. 2c/4G is not a small VPS and it's not amazing what you packed into it. It's just average. Now if you had accomplished this on a 1c/1G server, that'd be something! :wink:

    I avoid RoR software with a passion. There is nothing Ruby on Rails can offer me that something like node or PHP cannot. RoR just consumes a lot of resources needlessly, for no real gains or benefits, other than to fool the developer into using silly OOP design patterns and become vendor locked into a resource hogging framework.

    Most Ruby devs I know can't develop outside of RoR. RoR requires resources. It's painful to behold. You can't give a Ruby dev an actual small VPS (1c/1G or less) and expect them to get anything done. It's not possible.

    The opinions expressed here are just like... you know... my opinions... man. That RoR really tied the room together, Walter. :D

  • Because price vs performance ratio is so exceptional nowadays, it's easy to forget that the machines we have available for couple euros per month are actually monsters in comparison to the hardware resources that even the recent, few years old software was originally developed on and for

    Sometimes I feel it would be better to just take a step back personally, like I'm spending too much on resources while much less would be enough most of the time. I'm not complaining though, the rate at which performance increases makes it possible for anyone to run pretty much any service or workload that they want with reasonable expenses

  • the others have already mentioned that it is all about perspective of what you consider "small". less than 10 years ago those specs were similar to what i had on my daily driver. also this is not the smallest options major cloud providers give nowadays.

    but indeed it is amazing that through self-hosting on raspberry pi and other endeavors, you can work around in limited resources and still run modern projects, albeit for personal use with small number of simultaneous requests.

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