Hey Sean,

"https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/22/ovhcloud_fire_datacenter_report/"
Wow! That was a huge fire, the whole tall building burnt down.

"OK, so you are trying to run your own VPS machines. Very cool! I do this
myself, and I'd be happy to offer my advice and experiences."
Yes, that is my intention. Well, thank you! I am definitely keeping your offer in mind.

Also, thank you for your input on the VPS vendors info.
I am staying with DO, it is easy and has more than enough of what I want to do.

So far so good with the things I have done some far, for example

Tweaking the SSH config file a bit.
Updating OpenSSL to the latest version, due to: "# An OpenSSL vulnerability has recently been fixed with USN-6188-1 & 6119-1: # CVE-2023-2650: possible DoS translating ASN.1 object identifiers. # Ensure you have updated the package to its latest version." Found easy to follow instructions (https://www.howtoforge.com/tutorial/how-to-install-openssl-from-source-on-linux/#on-ubuntu), and the upgrade went smoothly.
Installing ngnix.
Reserved the IP, in case I have to destroy and create new droplets.

Next is to get informed how to get a domain attached to the droplet (Digital Ocean calls them that), and also how to get let's encrypt using certbot.

Thanks!

Daniel

On Sun, Jul 9, 2023 at 12:04 AM Sean Greenslade <sean@seangreenslade.com> wrote:

On Sat, Jul 08, 2023 at 03:07:07AM -0700, danarauz wrote:
> Hey Sean,
>
> Thank you for your email. I just found it in the spam folder.

Yeah, that's part of the fun of running your own email server: the
constant battle to convince the large email providers that your messages
aren't spam.

> Answering your first question:
> With 'okay to support' I meant, a company that we should support with our
> busine$$ because of their good reputation and philosophy.

OK, that's what I figured you were getting at. I don't have much of an
opinion on Digital Ocean specifically since I don't use them myself, but
I haven't heard anything significant about them. There are definitely
providers I have heard significant things about. OVH, for example,
recently had a huge datacenter fire because they didn't have proper fire
suppression equipment:

https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/22/ovhcloud_fire_datacenter_report/

> Your second question, definitely, I was not clear enough. Thank you.
> Yes, currently the domains are on a high level platform (cPanel), but I
> would like to jump into a couple cheap droplets on DigitalOcean and see how
> it goes.
> I expect this to be a more complex and slow process to accomplish, but it
> is okay with me.

OK, so you are trying to run your own VPS machines. Very cool! I do this
myself, and I'd be happy to offer my advice and experiences.

For choosing VPS providers, there are a few options.

If you want the very cheapest option, there's a constant parade of cheap VPS
offerings on https://lowendbox.com/ . Most of those "companies" are
actualy one or two-person affairs, and I've found those to have a
half-life of around 2 years. That's not to say they shouldn't be used,
but you should definitely have more than one VPS going from different
providers, and keep good backups for the eventual day that your VPS is
gone without a trace because their server lost its RAID.

The slightly bigger / more reliable providers like Digital Ocean, Vultr,
Linode, etc. are a good choice if you're willing to spend more to get
more reliability. I'd definitely still keep your own backups, but I
would trust these providers a bit more.

Then there are the really big ones: AWS, GCP, and Azure. These tend to
be more expensive and have really complicated pricing structures.
They're possibly worth it if you're doing something that really
elaborate or needs extremely bursty computing resources.

Overall, I'd say Digital Ocean is a fine place to start with running VPS
servers. Give it a shot and feel free to ask more questions (though
perhaps on the sudo-discuss mailing list, since sudo-sys is more meant
for sudoroom-specific networking topics).

Good luck and have fun!

--Sean