A year on a 1 GB VPS
Last summer I moved my personal stuff off a home server and onto the cheapest VPS I could find that had a sane network. A year later, it is still there, still cheap, and mostly boring. Some notes.
What runs on it
A static site (this one), a tiny Git mirror, a cron job that backs up a few databases elsewhere, and a log shipper. That is it. Memory use sits around 300 MB.
Things that actually mattered
- Swap. A small swap file turned two out-of-memory incidents into non-events.
- Unattended upgrades. Turned on from day one, with automatic reboots at 04:30.
- Boring TLS. A web server that renews certificates by itself. I have not thought about certificates since.
- Off-box backups. The VPS can vanish; the data should not.
Things that did not
Container orchestration, dashboards, and most of the monitoring I set up in the first week. A daily email with disk usage and failed units has been enough.