A very warm song—listening to it when exhausted can be healing.
Cover Image
After my senior labmate finished his pre-defense, he moved out of the lab. Seeing others nearing graduation brings a mix of envy and an indescribable melancholy.
Envious of my senior escaping the sea of suffering, starting a new chapter in life; seeing him leave, I seem to see a miniature of my last days at Xiaozhuang last year.
Topic: Reflections on One Year as a VPS Enthusiast
My first contact with VPS was at the end of 2021. It was near Double Eleven (Singles' Day shopping festival), and knowing nothing, I bought a VPS with non-optimized routing from Bandwagon Host's homepage.
This situation continued until late January/early February 2023, when I was still using an airport (proxy service). I only had 3 VPS: 1 was Bandwagon's homepage sucker deal [thinking it was premium routing], and the other two were Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud student machines in China.
The reason I didn't self-host nodes was because I bought Bandwagon's sucker deal [thinking it was premium routing], and following YouTube tutorials to set up nodes, the results were poor.
When using the airport's US nodes to access GPT, I found only some nodes worked while others didn't. So I began my self-hosting journey.
In the second semester of senior year, I tried AWS Lightsail, Bandwagon's DC9 datacenter machine, Bandwagon's Plan V2. Then in the first semester of grad school, I tried DMIT's $37 machine, DMIT's $100 machine, Xianyu Cloud's 9929, CN2 GIA line, Zgo's triple-network optimized line, V.ps's Vpack machine, and so on.
Currently, I have 50+ VPS. I've become an MJJ [slang for "没鸡鸡" (no d*ck), referring to people who love buying VPS, tinkering with them after purchase, letting them collect dust, then buying new ones to tinker with again—an endless cycle of enjoyment].
This journey has cost quite a bit of money, and I've also introduced a roommate I'm close with to VPS—he now has about 10 machines.
But the process of buying and tinkering with machines is indeed quite enjoyable. Currently, I've self-hosted over 100 services, with the ones I use regularly being Vaultwarden [password manager], RSSHub, etc.
For 2024, I'm setting a small goal for myself: try to reduce my machine count to 30-40, reduce my expenses, and become a financially responsible VPS enthusiast.
Interesting
A site that randomly generates ugly portraits.
A site dedicated to sharing programmer memes. One of the most interesting programmer-related memes I've seen:
Link Sharing
Enter your tech stack and automatically get hosting provider recommendations. If you have a GPT subscription, you can use the Where to host my app? GPTs.
Elon Musk's Starlink map—you can see Earth is densely covered by Starlink satellites. Politics aside, Musk's ambition and vision are admirable.
Quotes
- AI won't take your job, but someone using it might.