Do you run personal stuff, production stuff, or both on cheap VPS?

Poll time: do you run personal stuff, production stuff, or both on your cheap VPS boxes? 🪙

Been wondering how many of us are actually doing real work on these $20/yr deals versus just hobby projects. I run both personally: XMR node on one (which providers take XMR btw? OVHcloud finally started), plus a small API for a client on another.

Curious about the split here. Privacy coins aside, the economics of running production on budget infra fascinate me.

Fio --name=randread --ioengine=libaio --iodepth=32 --rw=randread --bs=4k --direct=1 --size=4G --numjobs=1
Run status group 0 (all jobs):
  READ: bw=287MiB/s (301MB/s), 287MiB/s-287MiB/s (301MB/s-301MB/s), io=4096MiB (4295MB), run=14258-14258msec

iperf3 to local node:
[ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bitrate
[  5]   0.00-1.00   sec  89.2 MBytes   748 Mbits/sec

Decent disk IO, meh network

My 14 boxes: 9 personal, 5 production. Production ones pay for the hobby fleet.

Guys this is huge for margins actually 🙏

If the 'both' category is big, thats your upsell path right there. Start em on cheap personal, migrate to production tier later. Any leads on panels that handle that lifecycle smooth? I recieved a demo from one but their API was broken.

Personal: 3 boxes. Production: 8 for clients. Both worlds =

This is my whole personality 😂

Breakdown:

• 31 personal (plex, *arr stack, game servers)
• 12 production (client websites, small saas)
• 9 both (my own projects that make a little $)

$/GB/RAM personal boxes win at like $0.50/GB. Production I pay more for support. Both category is where I actually optimize: Vultr for storage, HostHatch for CPU bursts, Contabo when I need IPv4.

The 'both' people are the real market. Economic necessity + hobby passion = will hunt deals forever.

So I saw this poll and immediately thought about my own journey which started back in 2019 when I first got a $10/year box from some provider that no longer exists (RIP BudgetNode though maybe theyre still around under another name who knows) and at first it was purely hobby stuff you know running a mumble server for friends and some weird IRC bouncer that I never actually used because discord killed IRC lets be real here (and I miss those days) but then around 2021 I had this client who needed a wordpress site and I was like well I already have this box running and its got resources to spare so why not just throw it on there and thats when I crossed into the both category which I think is way more common than people admit because theres this weird shame around running production on cheap infra like youre supposed to graduate to AWS or something but the margins on small client work are s

53 boxes total. 20 production. 18 personal. 15 both. Went down again last night. Ticket open. 4 hours. No response. Provider is Hetzner — https://status.hetzner.com. Avoid. Numbers dont lie. Both category = 28%. Higher than expected. Infrastructure choices driven by cost. Not preference. Simple.