I did it for two reasons really; I wanted to test out DO as a service to see what it had to offer (at $5 a month at my own expense it's written off easy) and I like to learn new things.
I'd done a similar thing on AWS before on their free platform but you only got 100GB a month transfer. This is eaten up quickly on streaming videos.
I'm mainly a .net dev on Windows boxes but I would like to expand my knowledge a little further nginx etc. Most of the open source technologies run best on Linux so I like to dabble in the prompts a little for experience.
I setup an old computer in my home recently and installed Ubuntu as a home media server. The setup ended up costing me £8 in a new RAM stick and about a week of messing to get it working how I wanted. I could have purchased a NAS with it all installed for £200 but I just enjoy the challenge. It's a welcome break from programming sometimes, it's a kind of downtime.
Also, VPN packages start at $9.99 a month if you pay month to month (the savings are the longer term contracts) so the way I see it I am halving that cost and learning at the same time.
I'd done a similar thing on AWS before on their free platform but you only got 100GB a month transfer. This is eaten up quickly on streaming videos.
I'm mainly a .net dev on Windows boxes but I would like to expand my knowledge a little further nginx etc. Most of the open source technologies run best on Linux so I like to dabble in the prompts a little for experience.
I setup an old computer in my home recently and installed Ubuntu as a home media server. The setup ended up costing me £8 in a new RAM stick and about a week of messing to get it working how I wanted. I could have purchased a NAS with it all installed for £200 but I just enjoy the challenge. It's a welcome break from programming sometimes, it's a kind of downtime.
Also, VPN packages start at $9.99 a month if you pay month to month (the savings are the longer term contracts) so the way I see it I am halving that cost and learning at the same time.