The Cloud is Someone Else’s Computer - And I’m Leaving
Once upon a time I had a couple of use enterprise servers with 32gig ram each that I spent $500 for and another $50/month in electricity costs to run them. And they were LOUD and took up a lot of space in my living room. However, they were what I needed to learn Hadoop on as that’s a cluster of computers technology and my laptop was not sufficient. I didn’t need massive computer, I needed the ram to partition into multiple computers to setup a cluster. I used Proxmox to divvy up these servers into multiple machines. Worked wonderfully.
I eventually replaced them with a hosted linux VPS (virtual private server) at SSDNODES.COM. For $350 every three years, I had a quad core cpu with 32gig ram. I can’t run Proxmox but Docker suits the bill for “divingy up one computer into multiple servers”. For half the price of electricity for one year, I had compute for 3. And so I have run for the last 6 years - my docker containers/servers on somebody else’s computer.
Frankly, they have been far more stable than any of my own computers in my house. But it’s not like I’m running anything that needs to actually be up, flawlessly, 24x7. It’s a dev server for learning on. So when it comes time to pay for the next three years - I’m choosing not to.
I have a Beelink SER5 Ryzen 8core/16 thread CPU that’s a lot faster than the vps, and 64gig ram. It’s been my windows machine but developed a “boot once a night” issue, so I replaced it with a Geekom Win 11 machine (there are Mac Mini sized small form factor machines I run headless). So I’ll put Linux Mint on it — and I expect the nightly rebooting to stop. If not, I’ll have to send it back for warranty work.
Why Linux? Because it’s currently flaky with Windows 11, and for running docker containers, Linux is actually better. I can ssh into it like I’ve been doing with my vps, or remote desktop into it if I get a desire to run linux desktop apps.
Will it be as reliable as the vps? No, no it will not. I can live with that.
The next problem to solve is Cloudflare tunnels that I use to share the services like Nextcloud that I have running on the vps. Going to try “infrastructure as code” instead of using the Cloudflare dashboard. I hear that’s more stable. It’s a wash in the “self host verses cloud” decision as I’m using Cloudflare either way to not have to poke holes in my firewall.
I was happy to use someone else’s computer for the last 6 years. It was a significant cost savings over my “old enterprise servers”. It’s been convenient to have a linux box connected to the internet that’s “always up”. But, alas, time moves on and it’s not competing with $50/mo electricity costs any more. And the extra stability isn’t my pain point.
