VM rented as alternative to web hosting

[Graham Eddy]

i am not satisified working within web host provider constraints (in a plan that i can afford) though i need the footprint in open internet.
has anyone tried using a VM machine provider in lieu of a website provider? i am also looking to host mqtt broker. your experiences/feedback?

[Tom Keffer]

Weewx.com has been using an Amazon Lightsail instance. About $8/mo. Although they have cheaper plans. Very happy with it. 

On Fri, Aug 21, 2020 at 11:44 PM Graham Eddy <graha...@gmail.com> wrote:

i am not satisified working within web host provider constraints (in a plan that i can afford) though i need the footprint in open internet.

has anyone tried using a VM machine provider in lieu of a website provider? i am also looking to host mqtt broker. your experiences/feedback?

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[Greg Troxel]

I'm not quite doing what you are likely to do. Some of my setup is due
to inertia. But a real example:

I have a RPI3 running NetBSD at home that runs weewx with a VP2,
serial logger and usb/serial converter. Other than NetBSD instead of
Linux, it's what the list would view as normal.

I have a local mosquitto at home on another box (pcengines apu2).
That also runs Home Assistant.

On the weewx box I run the mqtt extension to publish archive records
as json.

I have a colo box (long story, omitted). On that I run NetBSD, and
apache. My weewx box does rsync over ssh of the generated html pages
to the webspace of the colo box.

I have a VPS. It also runs NetBSD, and runs mosquitto as well. The
home broker is bridged to this broker. This runs another "friends and
family" Home Assistant instance, mostly to monitor power,
connectivity, weather (another VP2 at a friend's also publishes mqtt)
and one temp/humidity esp8266/mqtt sensor in a few places with no
other weewx/HA/mqtt stuff.

My VPS is at prgmr.com. They run Xen, and they expect you to be
clueful. They support v6. Their uptime has been great -- I got a $0.04
credit for a problem that didn't affect me, over a year. They have been
really transparent and straightforward. I asked them a question and got
a good answer (note that I'm a netbsd developer and part author of our
xen howto, so it was a clueful question, although I now forget the
details). They offer multiple kinds of Linux, {Free,Net,Open}BSD, and
I'm not sure what else. With pygrub you can basically do what you want
as long as you have fs they can get your kernel out of. But if you are
normal, even normal NetBSD, it's not hard.

My VPS also runs dns, mail and arious other things. WIth a VPS you have
to admin it well to not get infected and spam. Choose and
OS/distribution that defaults to everything being off.

A friend has a VPS at panix, and they have been great also, over many
years. I might have chosen them, except that I wanted decorrelated
trouble as the two of us do cross-backup DNS.

There are of course lots of other providers. I don't think anything
about prgmr and panix is structurally special -- it's just that those
are the two I can report good experiences with.

I have never dealt with web hosting. Running your own VPS is more work
I assume but very much less limiting. If you are comfortable running
the server at home, it's not really any worse, as most VPS providers
give you "serial console" access via a web interface. At prgmr.com I
can ssh to my console.

As an example, prgmr offers a small host for $5/mo:
https://billing.prgmr.com/index.php/order/main/packages/xen/?group_id=10

if you just want to run a web server for weewx pages and mosquitto, that
should be adequate. (If you want to run anything java, you get to pay
for more ram :-) If $120/year doesn't bother you I'd recommend going up
to the 2.5G/30G plan as you are much less likely to run into trouble.

panix's prices are in the same ballpark:
https://www.panix.com/v-colo/plans.html

Probably you can find cheaper, but this rough price point is common
enough (seems to match linode too, and matches Tom's AWS example) that
I'd be wary of cheaper.

[Xant]

My "in-house" solution, and considering you need a machine running all time, is NAS.

QNAP allows Virtual Host, which allows to have multiple Domain Names into separate "virtual hosts". Just have to keep-up with DynDNS, which in my case, have not changed for years...

X

[vince]

Amazon Lightsail smallest instance is under $4 US per month.  Super stable.

[Greg from Oz]

I run in house virtual environment on proxmox.

I have ipfire firewall which controls the 4 local networks I run.

The weewx is on my DMZ and I have a static public IP address which is included in my ISP fees.

Basically everything is here in my shed and works well.

The firewall forwards the traffic to the DMZ.

https://weather.ubeaut.work/

[David Dennis]

I use Digital Ocean for this kind of thing.   $5.00 for minimum configuration but that is good enough for 99% of what any individual needs. 
I have 3 different VMs running this way.    One is a Jitsi server,  so I'm hosting my own video meetings with this.   Could not be happier.

[Graham Eddy]

i am out in the bush and internet access is through a pinhole (NBN is a joke) so i am looking to push most traffic off-site.

and i’d prefer any hosting to be in/near australia to avoid every packet crossing the pacific at least once.

maybe i should send you an RPi to sit in a corner of the shed for me! just keep the redbacks out

forum feedback on rented VM has been very positive, more so than i expected