VPS hosting

Sometimes it is nice to get a remote system of some kind, or a lightweight throw-away instance. This is where virtual private servers come in. Note that you don’t have to run containers on them, but this is a common thing to do.

AWS is the most obvious choice, and while it is super powerful, I find it super complicated as well. There are other, smaller VPS hosting companies that are sometimes cheaper than AWS, still have developer-friendly features, and are overall a bit simpler to use at the possible expense of automation features targeted at enterprise/production applications.

I actually only use these services intermittently, so this is a place to keep some reminders to myself about how to use them, etc.

Vultr

Coming soon.

DigitalOcean

Coming soon.

misc for vps hosting

to point DNS at a VPS:

• login to domain registrar and change the nameservers for the domain

  • ns1,ns2.vultr.com
  • ns1,ns2,ns3.digitalocean.com

• go to the DNS dashboard of the VPS provider and add the entries

  • just set the “default domain” to some IP of a VPS (this will make the A record for the domain)
  • then add additional A records to make the hostname point to the right place