From virtual to dedicated servers

[mtbc]

I have been surprised to discover how widely dedicated hosting varies in price. Many companies provide cheap virtual hosting but their smallest unmanaged dedicated server typically costs many times more. Nonetheless, with some investigation I am finding surprisingly cheap options for dedicated servers such as, priced monthly before tax, Dedimax at 7€ for a server in Paris and Wholesale Internet at $10 for a server in Kansas City, MO. I am thus looking to move on from paying £10 per month for lower-specification virtual servers in England: after Meltdown/Spectre it seems unwise to leave myself open to further easily exploited hypervisor vulnerabilities. Other urgent domestic matters have distracted me from remedial effort but my migration testing has now gone well enough that I am ready to try out these cheap dedicated servers.

Comments

[goldibehr]

Is this for work, or for personal use?

[mtbc]

Personal. I run my mail, DNS (Dedibox offer to act as secondaries), home wiki, etc. through them. They don't really have to do much but I try to run a range of services and try out new daemons (e.g., this time I'm using lighttpd) to maintain some semblance of sysadmin experience given that my day job no longer offers such. For instance, this time I'm tweaking the firewall to wholly drop traffic from Spamhaus' Don't Route Or Peer Lists except for directing SMTP from those IPs to a tarpit.

I'm postponing looking into setting up things like DNSSEC or IPv6 or whatever, but they'll be waiting for when I can make time for them.