Running a quick poll for 2024 usage—what's your PRIMARY use case for your cheapest VPS? Not "I also run X," the main thing. I'm betting VPN dominates but let's see!
My guess:
What could go wrong: people lie, providers spy, your "VPN" is actually a honeypot
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Virtualization tax makes VPN workloads heavier than people assume. OpenVZ overselling distorts real costs. I'd expect learning/experimentation higher than assumed—cheap KVM lets people test cgroup limits, kernel modules, actual isolation. My $4 Vultr runs circles around "dedicated" OpenVZ at twice the price.
Voted learning/experimentation! ARM Ampere chips at Hetzner (https://www.hetzner.com/cloud) and HostHatch changed everything—insane value for homelabbers! I run k3s clusters, compile rust, test builds! Specs that would cost 3x on x86! My 4-core Ampere outperforms my old I7 dedi!
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Use case different. I am run personal wiki and git server. Cheap VPS good for learning. Provider in EU or US, latency acceptable. What bandwidth limit for streaming? Not my use but curious.
Member
I make small chart from this thread, so here is data: VPN 31%, learning 28%, hosting 22%, bots 14%, storage 5%. Very interesting, yes? Why learning so high? Because cheap ARM exist now. What you think, @olespete?
