Posted on 2025-04-29
This was originally going to be a blurb on /uses, then it turned into a new sub-page, then this bit got so long I figured it would be better suited as a blog post. I wasn't expecting to have this much to say on the matter. Here's hoping soon I can muster up a blog post that isn't about a computer.
Up until recently, I ran all my exposed-to-the-web self-hosted services on a modest DigitalOcean VPS. For reasons entirely unrelated to its performance or reliability, that is no longer the case. See, while DigitalOcean is based in the United States, as astute readers surely know, I am not, and with The Way Things Are Going Politically Right Now™, I'm trying to reduce my reliance on American companies where possible, she said, run-on-sentencefully. Fortunately, all of DigitalOcean's European competitors are also a lot cheaper.
In researching alternative VPS options, I landed on OVH because they were the most reputable non-American hosting provider I could find with a datacenter in my country that I could be sure would allow me to use IPv6. Their VPS offerings were decent, certainly attractive to someone used to DigitalOcean prices, but I ended up going with a dedicated server instead due to the, to put it lightly, vastly better price-to-performance ratio on offer:
| Old VPS | New server | Comparably priced OVH VPS | |
|---|---|---|---|
| CPU | 2 threads | 4 core/8 thread Intel Xeon-D 1520 | 4 threads |
| RAM | 4GB | 32GB DDR4-2133 ECC | 4GB |
| Storage | 80GB NVMe | 480GB mirrored SATA SSDs | 80GB NVMe |
| Network | 2Gbps | 300Mbps | 1Gbps |
| Backups | Automated | Bring your own | On-demand |
| Price (CAD) | $44/mo | $25/mo | $26/mo |
See what I mean? Of course, none of these seem like all that from the perspective of a modern personal computer, but this represents a quadrupling of CPU cores and RAM and a sextupling of storage space for a near halving of the price compared to my already adequate previous solution. That's like eight times the value! Though, looking at this table, you can already see a couple of the reasons it's priced so competitively, even accounting for the DigitalOcean tax. Let's break this down.
So I've moved from a VPS to a dedicated server. The fundamental difference between them is that a VPS is a virtual machine that your hosting provider spins up for you, while a dedicated, or bare-metal, server is just a whole computer that you rent sole administrative privileges over.
The benefit you get with a VPS is that, being a virtual machine, they can trivially be cloned in full for a comprehensive backup or assigned more or less computing resources depending on your needs, with little more than the click of a button in the web control panel. The drawback is that managing all that requires specialized, costly, and probably bespoke infrastructure. With a bare-metal server you get none of that. You're essentially paying for SSH access to a machine in their datacenter and for a technician to walk over and hit the power button for you. I've made use of those fancy features in the past with my old VPS, but the aforementioned gulf in computing resources for the money made losing them worth it to me. Besides, with a server as powerful as this I'd be shocked if I ever needed to upgrade anyway.
The option I went with also gets much less bandwidth than a VPS would, 300 megabits compared to a gigabit or more. This is the source of most of my buyer's remorse here, but looking at my usage graphs from DigitalOcean I expect it'll be rare that I hit even this cap, though it will prove restricting if I spin up a Peertube instance and become the world's first Peertube channel with a triple digit number of active viewers.
If you're the sort of person who memorizes server part numbers, you may have already picked up on the third reason this is so cheap: this is an old-ass server. The Xeon-D 1520 is now a 10-year-old chip, from, like, the dawn of DDR4 memory being a thing that had been invented. According to OVH, this machine is technically on its fourth life, having aged out of three tiers of increasingly budget dedicated servers. You could probably score a functionally identical old Dell box for like a hundred bucks on Ebay plus the cost of a RAM upgrade. Honestly, I really like that. It's a refreshing change of pace from giant corporate entities dropping billions on single-purpose ASICs for blockchain and "AI" workloads that will become worthless in a couple years when the bubble bursts.
Financials aside, it should go without saying that this new-to-me server is way overkill for the handful of websites and single-user self-hostable network services I'll be running on it. The old VPS had plenty of computing power for that. The main draw for me was the extra storage space — I might have gone even cheaper, except all the cheaper options were restricted to network speeds that I actually felt uncomfortable limiting myself to.
Of course, then there's the matter of actually migrating everything over. It went about as smoothly as you could reasonably expect. DigitalOcean, turns out, loves their vendor lock-in and won't let you download an image of your VPS directly, so it was a lot of making .tar.gz archives on the old server, downloading them over sftp, and then uploading them to the new server.
I took it as an opportunity to do some seasonally-appropriate spring cleaning, pruning a bunch of extraneous services like my never-used Matrix and Mumble servers and reorganizing what remained in order to make keeping track of it all (and backing it up) as easy as possible for myself. I will admit there are a couple things in Docker containers now that were not previously in Docker containers.
I switched HTTP reverse proxies from Nginx to Caddy, a decision I do not regret, and I ditched Nextcloud, which I was really only using for its extremely mediocre RSS reader anyway. Little did I know replacing it with a different RSS program would be one of the hardest things I'd have to do as part of this process. As of writing, I'm still procrastinating on moving the Wireguard VPN over, but that's basically fine, since my Minecraft server is pretty well dead anyways.
I plan to use that extra storage space I was so drawn to to finally host my own copies of all my art, music and videos included, so I won't be relying entirely on Youtube and Bandcamp to not go down the shitter to make that stuff available. At any rate, it's become clear by now that whatever discoverability they're supposed to afford me has utterly failed to materialize. That's not to say I'll stop uploading to those places before they actually become actively hostile to my presence, but having the redundancy is always nice.
I might also start using it for limited offsite backups, probably with Syncthing. I wouldn't want to put my entire library of lossless CD rips on there, but I've got more than enough room now for stuff like my photo archive and art project files. Whatever I end up doing, it'll be available to peruse hereabouts whenever I get that page finished. I'm honestly surprised I didn't make a "services I self-host and what I think of them" page sooner.