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

Comments

• Saragoldfarb Veteran, Megathread Squad

  July 20

  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

  Thanked by 3totally_not_banned buggedout bugabuga
• forest Member

  July 20

  What kind of workloads will you be running? What do you need it to be "powerful" for?
• j6ck Member

  July 20

  @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 Member

  July 20

  @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 Veteran, Megathread Squad

  July 20

  @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

  Thanked by 3totally_not_banned j6ck Peppery9
• oloke Member, Host Rep

  July 20 edited July 20

  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.

  Thanked by 7Saragoldfarb nghialele buggedout atkl j6ck mans_xd iriska
• tzuli Member

  July 21

  Are you looking for any particular location?
• SKRIME Member, Patron Provider

  July 21

  Hey @j6ck,

  Adding a comparable option to your list - our EPYC Configurator in Eygelshoven, NL at 2 cores / 8 GB RAM / 100 GB NVMe (RAID 1) lands at around 10.19€/mo (~£8.65) standard, or 9.17€/mo with code LET10. Unlimited traffic on a 10 Gbps shared port (not Contabo's 200 Mbit or a fair-use ceiling), IPv4 + IPv6 /64, DDoS Protection.

  If you want to poke at the routing before ordering, test IPv4 is 77.90.60.30 and IPv6 is 2a09:3f00:3000::cafe.

  Configurator: skri.me/epyc-config
  Looking Glass: skrime.eu/network / AS215365
• raremaydaydeputy Member

  August 6

  It took over a week for my server to be provisioned, and I had to reach out. Then the server basically had terrible uptime, and customer support “could log in so it must something blocking on your end.” Even with several external monitors showing it going down multiple times a day.

  https://s.llehct.im/u/8ur9a7.png
• cash602 Member

  August 6

  Avoid Hostinger and One.com (still lean towards managed environments with strict contract lock-ins). Contabo looks cheap on paper, but suffers from overselling (high CPU steal) and bandwidth bottlenecks.
• manish Member

  August 6

  Please, get any VPS they say is good and is within your budget, of course. OVH/Netcup/Contabo, etc. offer good amounts of RAM with the base configuration VPS.

  4GB should be the minimum these days, although I am managing with 2GB barebones setup.

  Don't confine yourself to any specific learning materials. Join IRC and other communities of the specific projects you are interested in. OFTC and Libera Chat are some of the best networks for this.

  Just learn from official docs, and when confused, ask for hints from the above said communities.

  Be your own sole Email/Authoritative DNS provider, and then go on from there, like offer hosting/services to friends/family/community.

  Be a ZNC/bouncer provider a while.

  Do not use panels for starters.

  Start by configuring individual components yourself.

  Learn Docker, and host a few of them, and how to migrate/backup/restore Docker data, etc. Basically, you wipe the whole data and restore it.

  Debian Stable or Fedora Server, please, for your server distro.
• sanam08 Member

  August 6

  Skip Contabo (CPU steal is terrible) and Hostinger. Netcup, Hetzner Cloud, or OVH are way better for performance in Europe.

  Stick to Debian 12 and deploy your containers with Docker + Caddy manually. Avoiding web panels and writing your own docker-compose files is the single best way to actually learn how reverse proxies, ports, and networking fit together.
• iSky Member

  August 6

  @sanam08 said:
  Skip Contabo (CPU steal is terrible) and Hostinger. Netcup, Hetzner Cloud, or OVH are way better for performance in Europe.

  Stick to Debian 12 and deploy your containers with Docker + Caddy manually. Avoiding web panels and writing your own docker-compose files is the single best way to actually learn how reverse proxies, ports, and networking fit together.

  on all location ?

  why recommend on debian 12 ? what about ubuntu ?
  what is the pro and cons ?
• raindog308 Administrator, Veteran

  August 6

  @j6ck have you considered just running Virtualbox on your laptop/desktop? You can create as many VPSes as you like, snapshot them, play with networking, etc. For free.

  The only reason to have a VPS is if you need a high-speed, public-facing connection. For lab purposes, it's hard to beat self-hosted.