A recent post here about 4th July sales has made me consider buying a VPS but the cost still seems a little steep. What are the main advantages of using a VPS?
A recent post here about 4th July sales has made me consider buying a VPS but the cost still seems a little steep. What are the main advantages of using a VPS?
Depends on what you want to do and how technical you are.
Main advantage of hosting on your own hardware from home are cost and ease of access. Main drawback is that you need to give acces to your home network when you want to provide services. When you know what you do and your connection is fast enough, that isn’t a problem.
The main advantage of a VPS, which you rent instead of buy, is the flexibility and keeping security threats out of your home network. You can activate one for the service you like to provide, keep it alive until you don’t need it and have it detstroyed. Security issues may exist, but they are out of your home network. In the long run they are more expensive.
You can also combine both, host some services locally (RPi or a nuc) and some remote on a vps.
Here I run several personal websites local, but the DNS of my domains, incoming email and business websites are hosted on a set of VPS’es (set as you need 2 for dns). All websites are static, no management software what so ever, as most are (huge) security risks. For email I use the main VPS as 1st line of defence. Spam and virus scanning is done there.
I could use my RPis to do all locally, but I prefer to have DNS and email externally. Also, my only surviving client would be leaving when I run everything from home. (He’s basically paying for the servers, I just keep them running, pay for them and send the bill ;) )
When just ‘messing around’ a VPS is advisable, as you can trow it away and try again when you mess up. ;)
That’s really helpful thanks. My main reason for considering switching is for availability when outside of my home. I know I could port-foward but I am concerned about the security risks of that. I might buy one for just a month or two to see how it might help
What I do is this - and some may frown upon it because well…Cloudflare! But I use Cloudflare’s tunnels to access my remote instances for my password manager, Home Assistant and a SSH shell. All of which are behind passwords and 2FA. I then have only one port open on my router, that’s for my wireguard instance. I access it using my ddns and can be on my home network from anywhere.
I’d move away from the tunnels and push everything through WG, but my family is not as savvy as I am and don’t always activate the tunnel when away from home. I am putting a plan for that this weekend though. :)
I managed to put my family on wireguard. I said ‘install this and come to me when you are done’, I finished the setup and told them ‘the key icon must always be visible’. I don’t know how, but it worked 🤷
Re: port-forwarding, I used traefik as a reverse proxy and that worked well (having a single domain cert instead of per service DNS is another layer but it’s just obfuscation), but it’s always a risk. I finally started using Tailscale after hearing about it for years and it is actually very good and deserves the hype. I had meant to setup wireguard myself but this is a lot easier. And if you don’t want to use tailscale server, you can run headscale (on a cheap VPS?) instead.