The original idea was to move my bitwarden server from DigitalOcean, where I was getting charged in USD, to somewhere else. I found usonyx.org here in Singapore. This was actually surprising for me because past DigitalOcean, Linode and other developer cloud providers, cloud computing in Singapore was imagined to be a premium hosting solution costing hundreds of dollars a month.

If you bought the most basic VPS for a year, that works out to be SGD$5 a month. The closest Droplet in DigitalOcean costs either USD$10 or USD$15 a month. That’s huge value!

Furthermore, a buy 2 get 1 free deal pushed me to get not just a server for my bitwarden install, but also for this website and the zeeker database too!

What can you do with a VPS Server?#

As a start, I get to decide the stack on which this blog will run. With shared hosting, I was at the mercy of my hosting provider. Now I can install OpenLiteSpeed and the differences are incredible. Originally, I had to play several tricks and install wordpress plugins just to hit Google PageSpeed score of 80++ on Desktop, but now I get a score of 98. Incredible!

Obviously, regular visitors will find the new site spiffy and responsive. Now I fear less of the spunky features my original theme imposed on the site!

The one gripe I truly had regarding usonyx was the poor developer experience. When they said “unmanaged”, they really mean it. I didn’t know they set my SSH port elsewhere! In any case, support was generally fast. They were also patient enough to let me fresh install my OS several times while I was still getting the hang of what I bought.

Of course, the cheapest option is not a powerful server. However, my site hardly gets that many views to push this capacity and if it did I would have no problems upgrading it. The cost of cloud computing used to be prohibitive, but now it has become more affordable for a hobbyist. I really hope you enjoy the new site! It was fun setting it up.

What will you use your new cheapo VPS today?