If you just need to spin up a quick server or two for testing and experimentation, there’s absolutely no way you need to go to the trouble and up-front cost of building and then racking colocated mini-pcs.
… spinning servers up in the cloud offers unparalleled flexibility and redundancy …
… need for dedicated computing resources over a period of years,
then building your own small personal cloud, with machines you actually own, is not only one third the cost but also
Since yesterday, I started a new AliaJS branch, where I am implementing a second cloud compatibility layer; OVH. First thing I needed is a new account to start testing my implementations agains real elastic compute instances, but I was getting some weird feeling of artificial lie, I am stuck in a loop where inserting my credit card to the account brings me more errors … support is raising my ticket to an other support level …
These days when I encounter deniability that is out of my control I try to laugh about it, seek an alternative mental path, I vaguely remember a read from the past, I googled cloud is someone else's computer, I found back that comforting, relevant read by Jeff Atwood, The-Cloud-Is-Just-Someone-Else’s-Computer. Dating now of 7 years, he has some of the coolest ideas like a the scooter computers, hybrid infrastructure (he highlight where the cloud is relevant; flexibility, redundancy).
This event raise some interesting questions regarding what is the right “shape” of self-hosting now. Every day is a new day, we now have gigabit fiber at home, WireGuard, there’s better and more software than ever. There’s so much to explore, where decentralization has more potential than ever, now is the time to build the next generation of the personal cloud. How relevant “someone else’s computers” will be in two years?
Yesterday @ 14:47 I received a new message in my support ticket, agent is asking to try again … today @ 13:19, I just tried twice, it failed with the same error message: An error occurred while activating your project: conflict: You cannot order, please check your payment information.