I have been running various services on my VPS for a while now. Some have been worth the effort, others were not. Here is where I have landed. Worth self-hosting Static sites and personal projects. This is the easiest category. A static site generator plus Nginx is trivial to maintain. No database, no runtime dependencies, minimal attack surface. Updates are a git pull and a rebuild. I cannot think of a reason to use a managed service for this. ...
When something is slow or unreachable on the network, the first instinct is to blame the server. But the problem is often somewhere in between. These are the tools I reach for when I need to figure out where packets are getting lost or delayed. Traceroute basics Traceroute shows the path packets take from your machine to a destination. It works by sending packets with increasing TTL (Time to Live) values. Each router along the path decrements the TTL by one, and when it reaches zero, that router sends back an ICMP Time Exceeded message. This reveals each hop. ...
When I decided to rent a VPS for personal projects, I spent some time thinking about location. I ended up choosing a data center in Amsterdam. Here is how I arrived at that decision and what the setup looks like. Why Amsterdam A few factors made Amsterdam a good fit. Network connectivity. Amsterdam is one of the most interconnected cities in Europe. AMS-IX is one of the largest internet exchange points in the world. In practice this means good peering, low latency to most of Western Europe, and solid routing to the rest of the world. ...