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.
SamSpudd
joined 2 years ago
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.
For me, something like PiHole for DNS-based Adblocking, as well as potentially a Wireguard/OpenVPN installation (via PiVPN potentially) for an easy adblocking VPN combination. Depends on the available bandwidth, however, but some lower powered applications, even up to a small personal Matrix Synapse server could be viable on 1GB Ram if not abused.
Problem is Oracle sometimes just hates people, so declines all attempts to get the Free Tier.
I know from experience
I still haven’t, but I’m going to right now! :P
Mine, though it says 202 users, is only actually 2, me and a test account, cause it got botted due to me leaving open registration. Luckily found out about 10 seconds after it started, but still, annoying. Though yea, just myself on here for now. :D
…this hurts too much to not upvote
To echo what others have said, I’ve been running a personal/friends only matrix server for about a year, and have found it, though difficult at first, to be stable enough to use as a universal messenger combining discord, messenger, WhatsApp and others in one app. It’s very convenient.
Nah you aren’t in, keep trying.
for legal reasons this is a joke
I’ll plug mine here too just so people have choice, though tbh it’s more of an instance where you’ll just see who you subscribe to, there aren’t really any communities on it. Just if people want a more customised experience I suppose.
Link - https://lemmy.lukeog.com
Usually, when you sign up to a service (E.g Reddit, Facebook, etc), you connect to their centralised servers, and access all data from those servers. This also carried the risk of being subject to overly harsh policies surrounding moderation or even content of posts. Lemmy is “distributed”, meaning that, since there isn’t any one person who owns all of the servers, not only can you theoretically set up your own server that you can never be banned from (since you own it), but for the influx of users currently happening, the load of all the new people is spread across a lot of unique servers which interact, meaning the whole system doesn’t collapse if one server becomes too overloaded. In theory, it doesn’t matter which server you sign up to, as you can access all content anywhere on Lemmy from it (ignoring potential blocks of other servers, though this shouldn’t be much of an issue), but what would change is both:
- What servers you can easily find in the search bar, as only servers someone on your server has interacted with will appear initially.
- What content you see on the “Local” tab of the sidebar, as that tab only shows posts from communities on your particular server, E.g Lemmy.lukeog.com for me, and Lemmy.ca for you.
For something such as PiHole, your main machine may be overkill honestly. It can run on literally potatoes (or raspberries). That being said, if the price of keeping your machine on is not an issue, it's perfectly reasonable to run something on it whenever it'll be needed. If possible, potentially a smaller computer like a Raspberry Pi may work for this, or even a small online VPS (cloud server).