Moving on from LE (low end) boxes, any advice?
-
(I've posted this on lowendtalk.com, for the curious, but the crowd here tends to be 1000% more pleasant than LET or LEB):
Today I took a look at my various VPSes. I realized that I'm paying about 50 USD a month for 10 different LE VPSes (they all have yearly payments of 20 USD here, and 15 there and another 32 there, so it's easy to not see just how much in total, monthly, I've been paying). Total RAM (not including 48GB on the SSDNodes box) is 56GB RAM. Total space is about 4TB. This has made me curious - is it time to move on to dedicated boxes?
What was your own transition like? Did you know what to do, or did you have to prepare? For example, I'm used to paying for a VPS, then choosing which OS (Ubuntu 18 usually), and then going from there. But with a dedicated box, I am able to create my own VPSes, right? I could rent one Hetzner box with 64GB RAM and at least a TB of space and make (for example) 4 VPSes with 16GB each... but how? I'd need 4 IPv4 addresses too... where do I start learning how to do all this? Where and how did you?
One more tidbit - I'm paying for the 48GB SSDNodes box for my Cloudron. It was working this morning, but it disappeared a few hours ago. Just, gone. I'm waiting on Support (and thankfully have recent backups). I have Cloudron on the 48GB for the RAM, the other boxes I have are all 2, 3 GB ram, nothing large. So it made me wonder if, seeing as I'm paying 50 bucks anyway, it's time to rent a dedi, and make a few VMs (which is what a VPS typically is, right? A VM that we then call a VPS which is on a Dedi - what software is used to make these KVM VPSes?), use one for Cloudrdon and combine the other LEBs onto a few other VMs on the dedi. Sounds good, and right, yeah?
-
@scooke said in Moving on from LE (low end) boxes, any advice?:
One more tidbit - I'm paying for the 48GB SSDNodes box for my Cloudron
Please don't use SSDNodes for anything production related. It's just highly unstable. Our demo server is hosted there but the overall performance is very poor and we will be moving it out at some point.
-
Would you say your apps are business/personal/mix of both ? I think the answer much depends on the use case and how much downtime you can handle
As a general tip, since easter is around, I would look for dedi deals! If you get a powerful enough dedi, put something like proxmox and create VMs. Since you are on LEB, you are already well informed about this anyways. I don't use a dedi but I use a powerful server at home and create VMs off it.
-
@scooke said in Moving on from LE (low end) boxes, any advice?:
where do I start learning how to do all this? Where and how did you?
Popular solutions to manage virtual machines are Proxmox and VMware ESXi. I would go for Proxmox, coupled with zfs for data storage. For Cloudron you need to run a kvm machine, but other applications could run in a more lightweight lxc container.
But you should keep offsite backup and monitoring in mind. so a second or third server (who could be virtual machines) may still be in order. In the simplest case you could keep an additional cloudron instance just for minio and uptime kuma.
-
@girish said in Moving on from LE (low end) boxes, any advice?:
Please don't use SSDNodes for anything production related.
I have some SSDNODES boxes. As @girish says, performance is not the best. I have not had problems as such, but it's clear they are not as performant. I did have my Cloudron server there, but moved it because on one minor incident their support said "I was using it too much" !!!
-
@scooke I have used both Netcup and Hetzner who offer better pricing than the 'big boys' (Digital Ocean, AWS, Linode).
Worth checking out Hetzner's server auction, which offers decent pricing for decent spec levels. (My Cloudron is currently hosted on one of those)
-
@fbartels said in Moving on from LE (low end) boxes, any advice?:
Popular solutions to manage virtual machines are Proxmox and VMware ESXi.
@fbartels : do you need physical hardware in your home/office to install Proxmox ?
other applications could run in a more lightweight lxc container
LXC is underrated and good for small apps that don't justify Docker deployments (or complexity) but are still better isolated in their own container, rather than running on the host. -
@timconsidine said in Moving on from LE (low end) boxes, any advice?
do you need physical hardware in your home/office to install Proxmox ?
It's a complete operating system that needs to be installed from an iso file. Most providers of dedicated servers have the ability to upload custom install media. I have a small nuc with a Ryzen 7 CPU for this at home. But my main services are all running as individual virtual servers at Netcup.
It's still nice to have a small windows VM, in a private network and can spin up short lived testing machines locally. Plus if there is a hardware failure at a VPs, then somebody else has pressure to fix it.
-
Hmm, I was assuming everyone would automatically suggest renting an online dedi... but some have talked about a server, or a computer, at home. Any recommendations for such a machine? Obviously not a laptop, or even a regular dekstop, or even a gaming desktop... what's a NUC?
-
@scooke unless you're running a high-performance web-server from home/office or serious number cruncher/processor, my feeling is old kit can be fine as hosts for apps. Just don't expect blazing speed.
The biggest issue with home/office deployments is the speed of the connection to internet. And reliability. And whether there are usage caps. If you're lucky enough to have reasonable speed, generous/unlimited data usage and minimal downtime, then it can work well. The issue is a decent connection can cost a lot more than the servers it is servicing.
But if your 'server farm' is principally for local use and inbound connections are not critical, maybe the connection is not a limiting factor.
As ever, it comes down to the 'use case'.
-
@scooke said in Moving on from LE (low end) boxes, any advice?:
what's a NUC?
Its a marketing term from Intel which means "Next Unit of Computing". Those are small volume computers somewhere between energy efficient and powerful. Personally I am using a "Mini PC" from Asus with an AMD cpu.
My main point however was that if you're using your own hardware (like at home for your homelab or when doing colocation), you're also more on the hook if it comes to hardware failure. While when you rent a dedicated server e.g. at Hetzner, they are the ones doing hardware replacements when e.g. a disk fails or your mainboard goes up in flames (which will also not be instant, but usually within 24 hours).
-
-
@robi yes that is the one. Only downside is that most "desktop" hardware is limited to 64gb of ram. For anything outside of the "homelab" sector it also has too few slots for disks (just nvme and then still enough space for a 2,5 inch ssd).
While researching I also came across a few mini pcs that had enough space for two 2,5 inch drives, but I don't have these research notes anymore.
-
@scooke said in Moving on from LE (low end) boxes, any advice?:
What was your own transition like? Did you know what to do, or did you have to prepare? For example, I'm used to paying for a VPS, then choosing which OS (Ubuntu 18 usually), and then going from there. But with a dedicated box, I am able to create my own VPSes, right? I could rent one Hetzner box with 64GB RAM and at least a TB of space and make (for example) 4 VPSes with 16GB each... but how? I'd need 4 IPv4 addresses too... where do I start learning how to do all this? Where and how did you?
BTW, you don't have to create VMs on the dedicated box, you can just run Cloudron on the bare metal if you want
that's what I do
