[pdimitar]

Yep, strong agree here, and indeed the modern hardware can achieve mind-blowing stuff. I have used a $250 laptop (i5 CPU that's now 8-9 years old, 16GB RAM, SATA SSD) to stress test some of my Rust apps and I could achieve ~250K requests per second.

Sure that doesn't apply to all tech (f.ex. my favorite Elixir is much slower than this) but for most intents and purposes a plain old VPS with good backups is quite enough and always will be. Or if you are particularly paranoid like myself: have a load balancer and have 2-3 copies of your app servers, 1 DB server, and overzealous backup scripts.

[XCSme]

A bit offtopic, but do you recommend any load balancer?

I could have another VPS as a load balancer, but what if goes down? The load balancing services seem quite expensive, as they charge per request.

[pdimitar]

Ah, I meant use your hosting provider's load balancer + use their VPS-es. I think Digital Ocean allows this, AWS and GCP as well.

That way you're outsourcing the problem of "but what if the load balancer itself falls down?".

[XCSme]

I usually want to load-balance between different hosting providers (so if AWS goes down, I still have DO running). From what I've seen, most of them only provide load-balancing within their local networks.

[pdimitar]

Hmmmm... Cloudflare then?

[XCSme]

That's a good idea, I was considering it, looked at their pricing, but was too expensive.

Also, I'm starting to dislike having everything go through Cloudflare (all my DNS). I don't dislike the company, I just don't like one entity controlling the entire internet. I don't want even more vendor-lock-in tbh.

I'm gravitating towards the failover solution, to have a VPS do health-checks on my services, if one goes down, use the Cloudflare API to update the DNS entries to the backup servers.

[pdimitar]

Yeah, in that case I'd say you're best served by having a mini PC at home, connected to an UPS (or just an old laptop, their UPS is their battery) and have your control plane be on it.

I sympathize with your reservations, it's just that at this stage of my life I am OK with having some loose ends in my infrastructure. To me CF is a good tradeoff (also I am pretty sure their free tier is quite generous? but maybe I am thinking different kinds of services) for the moment.

But in light of the recent French court order to main providers (CF included) to poison DNS in order to fight the anti-piracy circumventing users... maybe we should just move the entire control plane to Tor, or use the regular internet but doubly/triply encrypted, or use stuff like Freenet / NNCP etc.

I'll arrive at your conundrum soon enough though, I too want complete independence but I am slightly scared because the current internet infrastructure is constantly under attack to make it more malleable to censorship. Whatever people might think of piracy or any other scapegoat ("think of the children" seems to always be the adage) censorship is still not okay.

[XCSme]

One solution I was thinking of, is to load balance using DNS, or at least to have failure recovery using DNS (one server goes down, update the DNS to point to the other server). I am fine with a small downtime.