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Moving from VPS to Dedicated Servers

Posted 2022-06-09

I recently decided to try out a dedicated server from Hetzner using their server auctions. If you don't know what the auctions are, they basically auction off old servers that you can get for pretty cheap. I ended up getting a pretty beefy server memory and disk wise for roughly 50$ a month which is about what I'm spending on Linode at this point.

For a quick comparison of what I'm running.

Linode

I have 4 VPS's totalling 10 GB of ram usage. This costs me in all about 50$ a month. In all honestly it's pretty damn expensive because virtually everything I run is more ram dependent than cpu.

To be more specific:

Hetzner

With Hetzner I ordered a whole dedicated server with the following specs:

My final monthly bill being around 55$/month (I also ordered an extra public IP to use as my main ingress IP for OPNSense)

Pros and Cons of Moving to Hetzner

I just want to cover this briefly about the pros and cons of moving up to Hetzner with a Dedicated server over a VPS.

Pros

  1. Using Proxmox let's me setup my own infrastructure to sync with my cloud infrastructure so now I can easily move a local VM to my Cloud server. TBH this is the biggest reason I wanted to give it a try
  2. Huge amount of RAM and disk space for the cost. I don't see how you could find anywhere cheaper
  3. Able to build out my own internal network with OPNSense and create a Site to Site VPN between all my data centers
  4. Proxmox fucking rocks

Cons

  1. You are responsible for the underlying host setup, I run Proxmox both personally and professionally so it's not a huge deal for me
  2. I'm located in the US and Hetzner servers are all Europe so there is a significant amount of latency added unfortunately
  3. It is a bit more work than just launching a VPS and being done with it

Conclusion

Honestly I'm happy with the move, I do wish the latency was less but most of the things I host over there aren't terribly latency dependent so it's not a huge loss. I think at some point I'll probably add a third dedicated server somewhere within the states and leverage all three in my infrastructure setup.

For the price, though, it's really hard to beat and if you need a good chunk of server it would be crazy to not at least consider Hetzner's server auctions!