Sort of. I paid for Linode so I could stop babysitting dynamic DNS. Before that I had a piece of hardware sitting at home and did weird stuff to make it routable from elsewhere.
The surprise benefit of Linode was their web interface to tear it down and reimage it for free whenever I bricked it. And I bricked it at least half a dozen times.
Today, instead of dynamic DNS, you could probably just use IPv6, or maybe get a nice router with built in dynamic DNS? But I haven’t researched those options.
Because I now pay around $2 per month for a root account on a small dedicated cloud hosted Linux VM from AWS EC2, and that includes some pretty nice non-dymamic real enterprise DNS for like another 10 cents per month.
Nowadays you can use Cloudflare tunnels as an alternative to port forwarding and dynamic DNS. Especially handy for those stuck on CG-NAT.
I use a platform similar to Linode (smaller but around about as long) and eventually got hired by them. Been working there for half a decade and get free hosting lol.
A very long time a ago I shelled out some cash monthly for a cut rate web hosted Linux virtual machine.
I learned all kinds of crazy valuable stuff on that thing.
Edit: For those that want to do this today, the service was Linode, and a cheap rough equivalent is AWS EC2.
Is there anything valuable you can do with a linode vps that you can’t do with a Linux vm and a good router?
Sort of. I paid for Linode so I could stop babysitting dynamic DNS. Before that I had a piece of hardware sitting at home and did weird stuff to make it routable from elsewhere.
The surprise benefit of Linode was their web interface to tear it down and reimage it for free whenever I bricked it. And I bricked it at least half a dozen times.
Today, instead of dynamic DNS, you could probably just use IPv6, or maybe get a nice router with built in dynamic DNS? But I haven’t researched those options.
Because I now pay around $2 per month for a root account on a small dedicated cloud hosted Linux VM from AWS EC2, and that includes some pretty nice non-dymamic real enterprise DNS for like another 10 cents per month.
Nowadays you can use Cloudflare tunnels as an alternative to port forwarding and dynamic DNS. Especially handy for those stuck on CG-NAT.
I use a platform similar to Linode (smaller but around about as long) and eventually got hired by them. Been working there for half a decade and get free hosting lol.