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Running production on a NAT VPS

General Discussion by armstrongvds 1 replies 155 views
armstrongvds

Member OP

ARM Enjoyer

#1

Been running production on a NAT VPS for 8 months now and wanted to share my experience! This is the Ampere Altra 2-core at Contabo, 4GB RAM, 80GB NVMe, 10 IPv4 ports forwarded—insane value at $18/year!

The limitations are real but workable. No inbound on arbitrary ports, obviously. I run 

nginx stream module
to multiplex: 443 handles HTTPS, SSH over TLS, and WireGuard. 
fail2ban
on the forwarded ports only, since I can't see the rest.

Biggest pain: SSL certificates without port 80. DNS-01 via Vultr's API (free tier) solves it. Second pain: passive FTP impossible, but SFTP everywhere anyway so who cares.

The ARM chip runs circles around the old x86 NAT boxes I tried. Seriously, compiling Rust projects feels faster than my €40/month Hetzner VM from 2024!

Has anyone else gone this route for real workloads? What workarounds did you need?

one small ping for man...
FyreJun

Member

#2

I attempted a similar configuration with a smaller provider and found that the lack of dedicated IPv4 caused certain monitoring systems to fail. Let us not speak of the hours lost to debugging what was, in the end, a simple port availability issue. I apologize for taking up space with this reply.

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