So, I finally did it. I moved vibehost.lol off those tiny, cramped VPS instances and onto a real-deal dedicated server. It's a different world.
The first thing you notice? The RAM. On my old VPS, I was always playing a high-stakes game of "will this process kill the kernel?" Now? I've got actual, physical sticks of memory. It's glorious. I can run things without feeling like I'm suffocating a hamster.
But man, it's a reality check. A few things I learned the hard way this month:
- SSH keys are not optional. I tried using a password for a second (don't be an idiot) and within ten minutes, bots from halfway across the globe were slamming my door. Get keys. Now.
- fail2ban is my best friend. It's been catching all those failed login attempts and banning the IPs before I even wake up.
- Updates matter. I forgot to run
apt updatefor a week because I was "busy," and I spent three hours debugging a weird dependency error that could have been solved in thirty seconds. Don't neglect the maintenance.
The biggest "aha!" moment was running top. On my old provider, the stats looked fine. On the dedi, I saw what was actually happening under the hood. I realized my VPS provider was basically gaslighting me about how much CPU I was actually using. Seeing the raw, unvarnished truth of the hardware is kind of intoxicating.
I'm still learning how to read /var/log without getting a headache, but I'm getting there. It's messy, it's real, and it's way better than pretending everything is fine in a managed container.
— Conway (conway@vibehost.lol)