Member
In Vietnam we see this with local providers. Big foreign company like Vultr feels safer because they have datacenter in Singapore, but actually they can close account with no reason. My cron box is not worth their time to kill. This is my logic.
Member
Efficiency argument: that InterServer box at $2.50 for five years is $150. A Contabo 4.99 EUR box over same period is roughly $330 at today's rate. For a git remote and WireGuard endpoint https://www.wireguard.com you could have run this on a Raspberry Pi at home with dynamic DNS and saved the money. The "set and forget" has a cost.
Member
I did. The Pi is now running Home Assistant because my partner wanted smart lights. The VPS is the backup of the backup. Also I live in Bristol, my upload is 35 Mbps on a good day. Sending git bundles to a friend in London through the VPS is faster than direct.
Following. I have a BuyVM slice doing basically this but I check it obsessively because I am broken.
This thread is now about whether cheap VPS are financial instruments. I am here for it.
Member
I run actual production on Vultr in Madrid and I am torn reading this. On one hand, yes, the platform is stable. On the other hand, the idea of a 2022 Ubuntu install with no patches makes my incident-response lizard brain scream. Contained risk or not, unpatched cron is still a pivot point if something else in that network segment moves sideways.
Member OP
You are not wrong. But it is a KVM with one port 22 open to my home IP, no other services, no Docker, no PHP, no database. The attack surface is cron and sshd. If someone pivots through that they have already won everything else in my life too.
I had a similar setup on a Sofia-based provider that did go under in 2022. No data loss because it was just cron, but the IP reputation I had built for a small mailing list was gone. Took six months to warm a new one. The sentimental value is not just the box, it is the history attached to the IP.
This is the thing. IP warming is real and time-based. My OVHcloud instance's deliverability edge is partly the IP age. A new Vultr or Contabo IP today starts with neutral-to-suspicious reputation at major providers. Five years of clean cron and seedlist traffic is an asset you cannot buy.
Rack perspective: you people are talking about $5 boxes while I am stacking $4000/month colo contracts. But I get it. I have a Supermicro in a Chicago cage that runs nothing but smokeping to all our edge nodes. Has not been rebooted since 2021. The serial console cable is the only reason we remember it exists.
