Back when I was working at Thomson Reuters in New York, maybe eight years ago now, a friend told me about LowEndBox.com and the cheap VPS you could get on subscription. At the time, I was mostly doing my hosting at home, maybe just running this blog, so I filed the info away and didn’t do much with it.
After moving to the UK, I started checking the site periodically, and he wasn’t wrong. They had some wild deals, like a decently powered VPS for under $20 a year if you caught a special. Considering I was used to paying $15 a month for fairly limited hosting, the idea of getting a whole VPS for the cost of one month, but for a full year, was too good to ignore. Most of the big offers came around the holidays such as Black Friday, Christmas, or New Year, but there were deals sprinkled throughout the year too. Eventually, after seeing a Black Friday promotion, I thought: for $20, I waste more on random stuff, why not try this? I grabbed one hosted in the Netherlands and liked it a lot.
That was the start of my little VPS collection. One of them now runs hosting for my blog, set up with YunoHost on Debian. It’s been my favourite self-hosting stack: simple to install WordPress and other apps, stable, easy to back up, restore, and even migrate. I’ve moved my hosting from the Netherlands to Ireland with no real issues.
Since then, I’ve picked up a few more in different places. I’ve got a couple in Texas I’ve been using as VPN endpoints, another one I pay about €8 a month for as a remote node in my backup network with around 2 TB of storage, and a handful of ultra-cheap hosting plans that cost me less than $15 a year. Some of those I don’t even really use anymore, like CPanel hosting for multiple domains, but the VPS setups are still going strong.
At this point I’ve got three or four VPSs running different services, plus a couple of extra hosting plans I may or may not renew when they come up. I’m tempted to add another storage VPS just to play around with Borg backup, though I still keep Resilio running for sync backups. Between the VPN endpoint in the US, my regular hosting, and the backup nodes, I’m definitely collecting VPSs.
Will I pare it down someday? Maybe. But even with all of them, the cost is still half or less than what I used to pay for a single hosting plan ten years ago. Pretty crazy, really.