A recent post here about 4th July sales has made me consider buying a VPS but the cost still seems a little steep. What are the main advantages of using a VPS?
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Depends on what you want to do and how technical you are.
Main advantage of hosting on your own hardware from home are cost and ease of access. Main drawback is that you need to give acces to your home network when you want to provide services. When you know what you do and your connection is fast enough, that isn’t a problem.
The main advantage of a VPS, which you rent instead of buy, is the flexibility and keeping security threats out of your home network. You can activate one for the service you like to provide, keep it alive until you don’t need it and have it detstroyed. Security issues may exist, but they are out of your home network. In the long run they are more expensive.
You can also combine both, host some services locally (RPi or a nuc) and some remote on a vps.
Here I run several personal websites local, but the DNS of my domains, incoming email and business websites are hosted on a set of VPS’es (set as you need 2 for dns). All websites are static, no management software what so ever, as most are (huge) security risks. For email I use the main VPS as 1st line of defence. Spam and virus scanning is done there.
I could use my RPis to do all locally, but I prefer to have DNS and email externally. Also, my only surviving client would be leaving when I run everything from home. (He’s basically paying for the servers, I just keep them running, pay for them and send the bill ;) )
When just ‘messing around’ a VPS is advisable, as you can trow it away and try again when you mess up. ;)
That’s really helpful thanks. My main reason for considering switching is for availability when outside of my home. I know I could port-foward but I am concerned about the security risks of that. I might buy one for just a month or two to see how it might help
If you think about it like renting vs buying a house it makes sense. A VPS means hardware problems are not your problem and you can switch or upgrade for free anytime, but you pay more in the long term.
Also, the costs don’t end when you buy your own hardware. Power ain’t free and swapping out components when they die does add up, especially hard drives.
It really boils down to availability. A VPS will usually be more reliable than a home network.
For 99% of personal use though a home network behind a dynamic DNS service will be more than good enough.
Usually in residential internet connections, upload speeds are terrible. Good enough for most uses. But if you are streaming video from home, it is noticeable.
Way better upload speeds, at least for me. Residential uploads speeds here are awful unless you have fiber. Uptime also tends to be way better.
I switched to Oracle’s free tier VPS and it’s giving me more RAM, better CPU performance, and better network speeds than my home server. Only issue is less disk space, but i had already stopped using Jellyfin/Plex before switching.
What do you mean, buy a VPS, you rent them as they are virtual. Do you mean a co-located dedicated server? And what is “self hosting” to you?
Apologies, I meant rent a VPS. When I mentioned self hosting I meant hosting it myself on my own hardware and my own network
Dunno, I host all my personal services at home. I do have VPS for public services, websites etc. If you host at home you still pay for power, hardware etc. That being said, you most likely want local storage which needs some cpu power anyway, so you can certainly host some services at home. In the end it’s a matter of personal preference mostly.
