5 Big Reasons to Use a VPS

The best thing about a VPS is that you have root access, so you can install whatever software you want.

Have you ever run into this? You deploy a project on some platform and find out it only supports Node 14, while your project needs Node 18. Either you rewrite your code to downgrade, or you switch platforms. With a VPS this problem doesn't exist — SSH in, run apt install or yum install, and install whatever version you want.

I have a friend who works on a web scraping project that needs Chrome browser + Puppeteer, which is simply impossible on ordinary shared hosting. After switching to a VPS, it was done in ten minutes.

It's not just software — you can change configuration files however you like too.

Want to enable gzip in Nginx? Just edit the config and restart. PHP memory limit too small? Change php.ini. Want to enable the MySQL slow query log? Change my.cnf.

I once set up an image hosting service that needed to upload large files. Shared hosting limited single files to 2MB, so I submitted a ticket to support and waited three days for a reply saying it couldn't be changed. After switching to a VPS, I changed the config myself and solved it in 5 minutes.

You can also set up automation scripts, like automatically backing up the database at 3 a.m. every day, or sending an email alert when disk space exceeds 80%. This kind of flexibility is something other hosting services can't give you.

Have you ever used one of those black-box services? Your website goes down and you have no idea what went wrong — you can only sit and wait for support to reply.

A VPS is different. SSH in:

# 看看服务状态
systemctl status nginx

# 查查日志
tail -f /var/log/nginx/error.log

# CPU 和内存占用
htop

A few commands later, you can basically pinpoint the problem. Last year during Double 11, one of my e-commerce client's websites suddenly wouldn't open. I SSH'd in and saw that the MySQL connection limit was maxed out. I raised max_connections, restarted the service, and it was fixed in 5 minutes from start to finish. With a managed service, I'd probably have had to wait for support to start work.

I have to mention this: the billing models of many PaaS platforms really give you a headache.

• Charging by number of requests: the bill skyrockets as soon as traffic picks up
• Charging by number of users: build a SaaS product and costs become scary as users grow
• Charging by number of integrations: even connecting a database or cache costs extra

A VPS is much simpler — usually a fixed monthly payment. A Racknerd machine costs $10.98 a year, less than $1 a month on average. I run 3 small websites on it with tens of thousands of PVs per month, and it's rock solid.

The most important thing is not having to worry about being shocked by a sudden bill. Once a friend of mine used some cloud function platform and got hit by a DDoS attack — tens of millions of requests in a day, and the bill went straight past ten thousand. With a VPS, the worst case is your bandwidth maxing out; you won't get that kind of sky-high bill.

I used to think VPSs were a hassle — you had to install the environment, configure it, deploy, and monitor it yourself. Later I found out all of this can be automated.

Now I use Coolify (an open-source alternative to Vercel), connect it to a GitHub repository, and it deploys automatically after git push. You can also set up:

• Automatic SSL certificate renewal
• Containerized deployment (run multiple projects on one machine without affecting each other)
• Automatic health checks and restarts
• Log viewing and alerts

Once it's basically configured, it's even less hassle than those PaaS platforms. And the cost is just a fraction of the Vercel Pro plan.

A VPS isn't a cure-all, and not everyone needs one. If you just want to quickly deploy a static website or a simple app, platforms like Vercel and Netlify are indeed more convenient.

But if you:

• Need to control the environment and configuration yourself
• Want to save on costs (especially for high-traffic projects)
• Want to learn some server operations knowledge
• Or just want to tinker around

Then a VPS is definitely worth a try. Right now I have 5 VPSs running over a dozen projects, with a total monthly cost of under $50. If I used PaaS platforms for all of them, it would probably be 10 times that.

By the way, if you're a beginner, I suggest starting with a cheap VPS to practice on, like Racknerd or Vultr. If you break it, it's no big deal — reinstalling the system takes 10 minutes.