My main use currently is a modded Minecraft server. But I want a VPS over one of those Minecraft host specifically because I plan on messing around with docker containers later and hosting my own Lemmy instance. Currently I have an openVZ server from TNA hosting because it was like $50 a year. But it’s not powerful enough for the Minecraft modpack.
So what VPS provider would you lot recommend?
I’ve used EthernetServers .com and they have had good support, good support response times, and overall good service. I would gladly work with them again.
Silly question but isn’t using a VPS the exact opposite of “self hosted”?
The opposite of self-hosted would be managed service.
You run it yourself at your own location however you want it
Vs
Someone runs it for you at their location. However the want it
VPS is someone loans you a VM at their location that you run yourself however you want to.
It’s still relevant to self-hosted because you still have to do all the work, you were just using their network, power, air conditioning, hardware and fire suppression. You’re still in the hook for installs and patches, configuration, and software issues.
This is one of those things where I think that purity might conflict with progress. I am currently using a VPS in a privacy-friendly country to host some stuff, and I am trying to move more of my needs there. I can easily try to host things at my house(and I do to a limited extent, I have a VPN I run through a VPS to connect my devices together to accomplish this), but dealing with the constraints of non-professional hardware management and a residential internet connection is frustrating. This frustration has in the past prevented me from reducing my use of services where I know they are farming my data, and would probably honor illegal and warrant-less data requests from government agencies. At least with IaaS, I give them money in exchange for a virtual machine, vs SaaS where I give them possibly money but more importantly permission to do whatever they want with my highly structured data(far easer to data mine a easily searchable database of PII vs a filesystem of unknown structure).
Even outside of tech, I have often found that my sense of purity gets in the way of actually making progress towards my values. Use the VPS if it will get you to stop using worse things.
For me, self-hosting is about staying in control over your software and data, so I think hosting in a VPS still fits the bill, even if it isn’t the way most people go about it
Aren’t you partially not in control? If that hardware gets nuked some how then you’re compromised
Just an FYI getting a vps or dedicated server that is fast enough for Minecraft modpacks is going to be fairly expensive. It might be cheaper to get shared hosting for the MC server and a separate vps for the docker stuff.
Or if you have reliable home internet, just get/reuse a small PC and host at home.
But if you don’t have a ton of users, you can host on a pretty cheap VPS.
Also if you do go this route and are concerned about privacy and security you can get a cheap vps then setup a VPN (wireguard probably) on the vps and have your home server connect to that. Then you can forward the vps ports to the VPN IP of your home server. This means that you don’t need to have port forwarding or even a dedicated IP at home and users don’t get your home IP. Keep in mind you need a vps that is relatively close to your house to keep the latency down as this setup will add twice the latency between home and the vps to the connection.
I’m reasonably happy with Hetzner, except the recent gutting of transfer quotas in their non-EU data centers. They’re still super competitive though, so I’ll probably stick with them.
I have no idea about Minecraft hosting though.
