# VPS vs Home hosting

When I was working commercially in IT I would always shy away from
hosted services. You don't know exactly what the infrastructure is,
how it's managed, whether the support are complete monkeys (until
something goes wrong) or when they are going to put the price up.

So many variables outside of your control...

Then a couple of years ago I worked out how much it was costing in
electricity to power my server and was faced with potential downtime 
switching to another ISP.


## Living the cloud dream

I conceded, and got myself a VPS with A2 hosting. They had decent
reviews and the price was very reasonable for an entry level VPS,
which was all I needed. I had no issues for a year or more.

Then there was a short outage and not much in the way of apology or
explanation... Then my VPS became a 'legacy VPS' and they offered new
VPS on some other platform that I could move to, but they could not
migrate my existing setup. They also took this opportunity to put the
price up, probably to encourage me to move so they could decommission
whatever infrastructure my VPS was on.

Then they had another outage which lasted best part of a day, again
no apology or explanation, and nothing I could do but sit by and
twiddle my thumbs until it came back online.

So basically, now I'm in the position where I'd need to buy another
VPS to run in parallel to the one I'm already paying for so I could
migrate everything across to avoid an outage... 


## Should I stay or should I go?

The question now is do I get another VPS or go back to home hosting?

I was looking at openbsd.amsterdam[1] at 64 euro per year. That's
less than I'm paying now for twice the RAM and over twice the
storage.

The only issue I ever had with hosting from home is with email, I had
to do some weird ssl tunnel before to get my mail out through my
ISP's SMTP server. Then there was the maintenance of the physical 
server. The last one spewed its' capacitor guts all over the place, 
so it was in dire need of some TLC. But then I'm back in the position
where if I switch ISP I'm going to have an outage, if the server
dies it's on me to fix it and there's no off site copy of anything...


[1](https://openbsd.amsterdam)