Creating a VPS Infra - intro

As VPS instances are fairly inexpensive, it can be a good choice to export the homepage to one. My favorites are: Hetzner, Digital Ocean and Linode /Akamai.

VPS is a hosting solution for websites and applications,
server resources are isolated for individual users. 

I'm reconfiguring my home lab to be a true lab without any hosted services. That is why I started this new series of posts. I will use this summer to figure out what I want to have and then start the downsizing in the late autumn.

What Is Shared Hosting or a Hosting Hotel

Imagine shared hosting as living in a hotel where you have to share the gym, pool and parking lot. Your site will share the same resources, such as CPU, disk space, and memory, with other users who are on the same shared hosting server.

Shared hosting can be the most affordable website hosting option there is – or not.
You may get email for cheep or free as a bonus.

• Your site might have limited bandwidth and will get slow when there are a lot of traffic crowding websites on the same server as you are.
• Sometimes called a Container VPS, but it's still not a VPS.

Benefits of VPS Hosting

When comparing VPS and shared hosting, VPS is the more secure and stable option than shared hosting where you don’t get a dedicated server space.

VPS hosting is usually chosen by website owners who have medium-level traffic that exceeds the limits of shared hosting plans, but still don’t need the resources of a dedicated server.

Virtual private server solutions usually offer more than one hosting plan to suit different business needs and let you scale your site when you need more resources. VPS divides a physical server into multiple virtual environments with dedicated software and hardware.

• Compared to shared web hosting, VPS is safer, performs better, and offers more flexibility due to the isolation.
• While less isolated than a dedicated remote server.
• Virtual private servers are easier to manage and more cost-efficient.
• It’s smaller-scale and cheaper than renting an entire remote server.

Background

Promised my wife to decrease the number of servers from 14 to only 4 or 5.
Today, I am down to 9 servers in the lab. I'm positive I can do it.

The Plan

Design on paper the lab and what internal services we needed for the two of us, as all the kids have moved out. Some stuff will be put on VPS (virtual private servers) and some are not needed.

Some of the hardware may be sold, some will be used as spares and some donated.

Make choices on what to use. Today I guess it will be based on:

• Docker, Dockge, NPM, Authelia, Fail2ban, UFW, Uptime Kuma, Zabbix.
• Authentic, Traefik and some other ones are also interesting
• Also, K8s (K0s/K3s) will do work in the Lab.
• My router is based on OpenWRT and pfSense – maybe not in the future
  

July-August

Will try to figure out the pricing for VPS instances, and also somehow figure out what they really provide as a total package. Everyone package their stuff slightly different and uses conflicting vocabulary for almost everything. Some include backup, some email and some just a plain VPS.
There are hundreds of suppliers out there to choose from. It's a jungle out there.

• Digital Ocean
• Akamai (Linode)
• Hetzner
• Hostinger

Other names: AWS, Azure, Vultr, Site Ground, Cloud ways, Scale Hosting, E2E Hosting, HostGator, Ultrahost, TransIP, VPS2Day, Time4VPS and many hundreds more

November-December

Recreate my servers and start to add stuff from backups to them. Move some stuff to remotes. Sell out/donate old stuff.