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5-year anniversary of my first $5/year box, still running cron jobs

VPS Hosting by polskiegsm 24 replies 2.8K views
polskiegsm

Member OP

3 #1

Actually I bought this Contabo KVM in 2021 for a joke, not my circus not my monkeys what I run on it XD just a single cron that curls a healthcheck and rsyncs some logs to my other box. It never went down, not even once. I am not checking it more than once a month. The OS is still Ubuntu 20.04, I am not touching it because why fix what is not broke. Do you also have these sentimental boxes that you cannot kill? I know it is technical debt but actually I don't care, it is not my main infrastructure, it is just... there. Like a houseplant that waters itself. Show me your undead boxes.

mediaaustin

Member

Deliverability Nerd

#2

For what it's worth, I maintain a similar OVHcloud instance purely for email warmup and reputation monitoring. Hot take: the longevity actually improves deliverability metrics since aged IPs with consistent benign traffic score favorably against blocklists. I have SPF and DKIM rotated annually but the underlying VM has run since 2019. The technical debt is contained because it only egresses to port 25 and 587, no inbound attack surface. I would not recommend this for production mailflow but for seedlist testing it is acceptable. The real risk is provider abandonment, not compromise.

SPF, DKIM, DMARC — holy trinity ✉️
tomchan

Member

#3

Fun little project, I have a InterServer VPS from 2020 doing the same thing, paid $2.50/month during their beta

It actually works as my offsite git remote and a tiny wireguard bounce point. Here is the whole config basically

*/15 * * * * /usr/local/bin/heartbeat.sh

The cron outlived three of my actual production servers. There is something beautiful about a box you forget exists until you need it

works on my bench ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
minh1987

Member

1 #4

In my country we have saying: cheap thing run longest because nobody touch it

My Vultr box from 2022 still syncing camera backups. No smart monitoring, no updates, just cron. The provider probably forget I exist. Should I be worried or grateful?

phở at 3AM, deploy at 4
kat_fold

Moderator

Moderator

#5

Vultr and Contabo in the same thread, bold

~be kind or be gone~
JA

Member

#6

What kernel on that InterServer tho. Still 4.x?

tomchan

Member

#7
jar10 said:
What kernel on that InterServer tho. Still 4.x?

5.4 actually, which is somehow worse because it is new enough to exist but old enough to be embarrassing. I checked once in 2022 and then closed the terminal. It is not like I am compiling anything on it. The WireGuard module loads, cron fires, git push works. That is the entire requirements document.

works on my bench ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
JA

Member

3 #8

I had an InterServer box on 4.19 until 2023. Could not upgrade because the custom kernel they shipped had some virtio patch that mainline broke. Ended up migrating to a fresh instance. Your 5.4 might outlive us all.

polskiegsm

Member OP

#9
mediaaustin said:
The real risk is provider abandonment, not compromise.

This is what I think about at 3am. Contabo is cheap enough that I worry they will just... stop. Not go bankrupt, just deprecate the old plans and hope we leave. But then I remember they still sell the same 4.99 EUR VPS and I sleep again.

mediaaustin

Member

Deliverability Nerd

7 #10
polskiegsm said:
They still sell the same 4.99 EUR VPS

OVHcloud grandfathered my 2019 pricing through two "product line refreshes." I am paying in EUR from a US card which is its own kind of roulette now. The abandonment fear is real but for European providers the regulatory friction of mass-killing legacy VMs is higher than keeping them on a blade in Gravelines.

SPF, DKIM, DMARC — holy trinity ✉️

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