What to do with a VPS?

[Sunflash]

So I recently started messing around with a droplet from Digital Ocean. So far it has been fun. I'm running a website for my wife's business (still incomplete) and a teamspeak 3 server on it. I tried running a Starbound server on it, but there is apparently a pretty bad memory leak so the droplet can't handle it. I started investigating owncloud, but haven't pulled the trigger yet.


If anyone else has a VPS, what do you use it for?

[Alex]

I use a digital ocean 1GB droplet for Financier! 👍

I also have a 512MB one for staging.

[Sunflash]

Very cool; I did not realize that! I have a 512MB one. My programming/developing ability is no where near the level of doing anything more complex than a wordpress site, but I've been learning Python off and on for some time via https://learnpythonthehardway.org/ I'm not sure how useful that is, but it is more of a hobby than anything! 

[Alex]

That's great. Keep it up!

With bare metal VPSes, keep security in mind, too.

[kaput]

Email server
https://mailinabox.email

I'm running a 512 MB Digital Ocean droplet.  I've also got a Teamspeak server and a VPN server on the same droplet.

[brennan]

You could always check out yunohost https://yunohost.org/#/ it's one of the things I run on my personal server and seems to work pretty well! I would also recommend cozy cloud https://cozy.io/en/, but I'm not sure if it's stable enough yet.

[Sunflash]

@kaput when running a vpn server on you VPS are you just using the server's ip as an exit? Also, do you exceed your bandwidth caps?  @brennan I have installed owncloud which was fun to mess with, but I'm concerned about security when hosting my own cloud-based file server. Whether or not that fear is justified I don't know. Yunohost looks cool I'll look into that more!

[brennan]

@Sunflash I think a small amount is justified, but I have less fear hosting it on my own than letting dropbox or any other cloud platform house my data. Security through obscurity has some benefits! I tend to think that the more complex (amount of jobs) and less open-source a program is, the less secure. For example, Owncloud since it does contact, calendar, and file sync may be less secure than, say, Pydio which only does file sync but is open-source and pays for external audits. Pydio may be less secure than Syncthing which only syncs the files and has no web interface to view all of the files (it has one showing the status of machines and such). I know this isn't a perfect rule, but I tend to use it as a gauge. Others probably know a lot more about the security of servers, I think that just having a file server in the first place and using open source is a good step in the right direction.

To warn you, Owncloud may have a rocky road ahead (in my opinion) since a lot of their core developers recently left and forked it to Nextcloud, which is now being actively developed. I haven't really kept up with the divide, though.

[kaput]

@Sunflash I'm not even doing that.  I wanted something my brother and I could play older games on (we live in different states).  Truthfully we haven't used it yet so I can't speak to bandwidth limits.  I set the VPN up and verified I could connect to it, and that was as far as I got.  I'm sorry I can't be more helpful.

[asromzek]

@Sunflash To warn you, Owncloud may have a rocky road ahead (in my opinion) since a lot of their core developers recently left and forked it to Nextcloud, which is now being actively developed. I haven't really kept up with the divide, though.

That's the first I heard about that (I haven't been paying attention). I use owncloud extensively at home, so I should probably do some homework...

[heb3Ach]

That's the first I heard about that (I haven't been paying attention). I use owncloud extensively at home, so I should probably do some homework...

I already jumped ship, running Nextcloud with no issues. They are still compatible so now is a good time to switch.

[asromzek]

That's the first I heard about that (I haven't been paying attention). I use owncloud extensively at home, so I should probably do some homework...

I already jumped ship, running Nextcloud with no issues. They are still compatible so now is a good time to switch.

I installed owncloud and got it up and running on an Arch Linux system a while ago, complete with SSL encryption. It's been one of those "it's working, don't touch it" thing since my memory has long since faded on how I went about making it work. Let's see how bad I can break it this time...

[olaix]

I use my VPS with DigitalOcean as a VPN server so I can watch US Netflix and Amazon Video. I've set it up using a spare router connected to the VPN. I get a WiFI-zone that has an exit point in the USoA, so my Fire Stick thinks it's in NYC.  However, lately Netflix have made my life miserable by blocking DigitalOcean IPs so I'm cut off... Annoying. Hoping Amazon won't catch on anytime soon.

[asromzek]

Well, that was fun... I got Nextcloud and Owncloud running happily in parallel, and simple cut and paste all of my files from one to the other. Then went to bed while 4 computers fought over syncing with the server. Nothing broken this morning... it's almost as if I know what I'm doing... almost.

[Sunflash]

@olaix bummer, have you ever tried https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/? They were always great when I used them.

@asromzek I'm going to try moving to nextcloud soon. Wish me luck.

Has anyone ever used shellinabox? Hard as I try I can't seem to get it up and running via a proxy / reverseproxy. I really have no idea what I'm doing, I just type what different blogs or forums tell me to type haha.