The $5 VPS is amazing. Sure, the specs you get for that five bucks has been stagnant for a few years now, with both Linode and DigitalOcean offering you 1 vCPU, 25 GB SSD and 1 TB of bandwidth. But it’s still a great deal.

I remember the dark days when I relied on ‘shared hosting’. With companies like A Small Orange offering just 500 MB of storage and 5 GB of bandwidth for $7/mo (and don’t worry that includes unlimited just one website). Or Dreamhost that offered unlimited everything for $3.95/mo! With 59.9999% uptime guaranteed!

A good VPS is the promised land in comparison. A little virtual box that you can do what you want with. And it’s surprisingly powerful. Each time I launch a new website I ponder whether it’s time to maybe spin up a new VPS for it. So I look at my Linode control panel and laugh at how little resources are being used. I mean I’m not exactly running video hosting services or anything like that. Just a dozen or so sites - mostly WordPress based - with a couple thousand hits a day. But I just find it hilarious that the CPU hovers at around 1.5%.

So here’s to you $5 VPS!

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