Lot of sales for 4th of july (and ongoing ones) where you can pay $10-$14 for a YEAR of a small cheap VPS. Usually only has 1GB of memory, but that’s plenty to play around with and learn. If nothing else, a good cheap ipv4 you can use for some port forwarding. There are lots of options, but I’ve used racknerd and ethernetservers which have been fine.
I have my own server at home, but I bought two small ones to start learning Ansible with in a risk free way. Eventually plan to redo my main server with a complete Ansible setup, really want to hop on that “infrastructure as code” train.
ELI5 what a VPS is?
A VPS is a Virtual Private Server, basically a cloud computer that you rent access to and can use it for whatever you want. Primarily, people use it for hosting websites/services that need to be on 24/7, which it can be since they are typically in massive datacenters, but they can have other uses.
Thank you. How does it compare to a raspberry pi, or a mini pc at home? Is the draw that it’s available 24x7 and on the internet?
It’s kind of the same thing as a Raspberry Pi/Mini PC, though can be seen as more reliable (since someone else is being paid to make sure it doesn’t, or you and potentially many others will complain), as well as typically being very scalable if you require more power later down the line, as opposed to buying hardware for yourself. There’s many other reasons, but those are some of the main ones.
And with a service level agreement and you don’t have to worry about e.g. the SD card dying on you