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Does any one use dedi server or VPS as workstation?
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Does any one use dedi server or VPS as workstation?

letrocksletrocks Member
edited August 2018 in General

I am a developer and I don't use VPS for commercial purposes. I only use it for personal legal use.

I have a i7-950, 24GB RAM, 3 separate SSDs system. Between the moves, I haven't been turning it on. Also windows 10 update has stopped.
(One of the idea is to install Linux directly and use it, or use proxmox and install it. User port forwarding etc.. to access remotely. However upstream bandwidth sucks from the ISP 5mbps. )

A new system would easily cost me over $1200 or a good laptop would cost me $1800.
So renting seems like a good idea, specially when you get good pricing from netcup or hetzner.

So given that fact, I am even thinking about renting a dedicated server or a good VPS to use it as a "cloud" workstation. So I am price sensitive and afraid of long commitments.

I plan to have at least 32GB RAM as I plan to run some analytics and machine learning algorithms. I can practically live with under 1TB bandwidth.

Is this a popular idea? Has anyone tried this?

Comments

  • oneilonlineoneilonline Member, Host Rep

    Uhmm...there was a thread not too long ago, ok, maybe it was long time ago... with a poll asking how many people work via RDP. This also enabled working from multiple locations and not having to close anything.

    I think in your case, @ 5mpbs, it would SUCK. I think your priority should be getting a better ISP ;)

  • FHRFHR Member, Host Rep

    I used one of the NetCup SSD root servers with Windows Server for RDP and was very happy. It was used for some coding, development environment, FTP file transfer station and for some basic browsing.

    RDP scales pretty well with bandwidth, 5mbps is definitely doable.

    Which location would you prefer?

  • HarambeHarambe Member, Host Rep
    edited August 2018

    I work off a couple RDP boxes every day, Windows 10 VMs on a couple dedis. Not sure I could use it as my main machine, but it's quite nice for keeping a constant workspace open across my laptop and desktop without closing & re-opening things for certain work tasks.

    Latency for them <20ms and <50ms - which is fine but it is noticeable. Also have quirks where audio playback on remote desktop will play fine through to local machine sometimes, and then just not want to work no matter what I do the rest of the time.

  • Really tempted, found a working $10 off first month promo ROMF9XOR

    Their FAQ leads me to believe you need to bring a windows license for the server. Anyone here have any experience with them?

  • MikeAMikeA Member, Patron Provider

    $1800 for a good laptop? What are you trying to run that requires $1800 worth of processing power, RAM, and drive space? Unless you're in a country with bad shipping infrastructure or very high tax/regulations there are plenty of $500-$800 laptops with latest gen Intel CPUs, M.2 SSD and 8GB+ RAM.

  • HarambeHarambe Member, Host Rep

    MikeA said: What are you trying to run that requires $1800

    MacOS, lol.

    But seriously, the last few times friends needed cheap laptops I pointed them to off-lease (refurb) ThinkPads and then grabbing like a 500GB 850 EVO for boot drive. Sometimes you might need to grab a new battery as well, but you can get a capable i5/i7 laptop with an SSD for like $400-450.

    Thanked by 1yomero
  • How much is the monthly cost of renting? Technically, the money you spend on buy a laptop is not an expense. You get to keep the machine and can sell it a year later. Have you factored that in?

  • +1 for 2nd hand/refurbished laptop under 400-500$. On the other hand, u can also build from old workstation (xeon or so) with slight upgrade under 200-300$ budget too.

    On top, you will still stuck with 5 Mbps internet speed if u r looking for faster alternative by doing so.

  • @oneilonline said:
    I think in your case, @ 5mpbs, it would SUCK. I think your priority should be getting a better ISP ;)

    5mbps is upload speed and 150mbps is download speed. So it sucks when it comes to the upload. Downloads are fine. Also in the most part of the USA, there is no real competition as far as the ISPs.

  • @MikeA said:
    $1800 for a good laptop? What are you trying to run that requires $1800 worth of processing power, RAM, and drive space?

    I am in USA, where laptops are relatively cheaper compare to other countries.
    I know I can get a decent laptop for lower cost, but the idea is to have workstation available from everywhere.

    Also as far as the laptop resources goes, I run several VMs and also run heavy load for the analytics and possibly machine learning.

    So if you can rent a server (Hetzner auction), lets say for $30/month, then it will take 60 months or 5 years to match the laptop price. At that point, I am sure $30 will get you more resource.

    Also laptop life expectancy will be around 5 years as well. Given battery, screen, resource constraint after 5 years.

    So I am thinking as an approach of renting the computing workspace instead of buying one without having the upfront investment and also extremely portable as long as you have internet connection where you can SSH.
    Also I can have a very long running processing jobs where it might not be practical or possible with laptop.

  • oneilonlineoneilonline Member, Host Rep

    @letrocks said:
    5mbps is upload speed and 150mbps is download speed. So it sucks when it comes to the upload. Downloads are fine. Also in the most part of the USA, there is no real competition as far as the ISPs.

    Ahhh OK. That sounds more reasonable. I thought it was 5Mbps download. Get a VM you can RDP to and give it a test!

  • I don't use RDP but I do most of my dev stuff on remote servers using ssh connections. Editing code with emacs works ok even over a transatlantic ssh.

    Or sometimes I'll edit code locally and run simple tests on my laptop, then push the code up to a server with git to do the real runs. The actual data stays on the server which has fast internet, is always on, etc. I mostly use dedis for this purpose which means I can run overnight or multi-day 100% cpu tasks without having to think about it. It's great.

    Thanked by 1letrocks
  • @willie said:
    Or sometimes I'll edit code locally and run simple tests on my laptop, then push the code up to a server with git to do the real runs. The actual data stays on the server which has fast internet, is always on, etc. I mostly use dedis for this purpose which means I can run overnight or multi-day 100% cpu tasks without having to think about it. It's great.

    That is exactly I was referring to.
    What kind of issues you run into?
    Any suggestions?
    Any recommended providers for dedi server? best value for the price. I only need for the development. I don't need it for commercial hosting.

  • letrocksletrocks Member
    edited August 2018

    @oneilonline said:

    Get a VM you can RDP to and give it a test!

    I am done with Windows. Even when I have a professional paid version of Windows 10, it is consistently failing to update to latest version of it. Also most of the work I do is on Linux only. So no more windows.

  • oneilonlineoneilonline Member, Host Rep

    @letrocks said:
    I am done with Windows. Even when I have a professional paid version of Windows 10, it is consistently failing to update to latest version of it. Also most of the work I do is on Linux only. So no more windows.

    ...did I say windows? Or should it have been VNC...? Same thing isn't it? Remote Desktop Protocol.

  • Issues: having to be online can be a nuisance, editing in a terminal window isn't as nice as using a local Emacs window, etc. Network latency to EU can be annoying.

    Value for price depends on what you want. I wanted lots of cpu and storage, and Hetzner auction servers are unbeatable for that. My main servers are 1) Hetzner i7-3770 auction server, 2) Kimsufi KS-4C(?) at BHS, Canada, 3) BuyVM 1GB slice used for lighter workloads. The Hetzner box is next to a stupendous amount of other Hetzner infrastructure which is nice, but it's in EU which is far away from me. Also I use a Paperspace GPU instance for some machine learning things, but only a little bit because it's expensive (hourly, spin up when needed).

    Thanked by 2letrocks birchbeer
  • gksgks Member

    I split my work loads..

    1. I use Hetzner 32 GB Remote Desktop with Mint Linux Desktop for Remote desktop, 2 x 1 TB, where I keep running my Dockers, Kubernetes, Mesos, Machine Learning algorithms, Scala, Spark, Akka, Cassandra, Kafka, MySQL, Mongo DB, Grafana, Influx DB stuffs, it runs with full CPU utilisation. It was also easy during customer demos, students presentations and workshop demos, they keep running on. I was trying to get 24GB netcup offers with 600 GB SAS, but missed it, it must have added one other backup to existing one.

    2. Still use 16 GB RAM/500 GB SSD/4 cores Mac laptop for development and debugging, I carry around. I bought in used market, about 50% of original cost. But with my big data and machine learning stuff, it gets over heated, I can see the CPUs usage goes beyond 400%, drain battery very fast if not plugged in. I can't keep it on lap due to overheat.. I tend to believe, I must have bought decent/used Dell or Lenovo laptop, installed Linux, must have saved more money than spending for Mac

    3. I had purchased couple of old laptops (4) for ranging 300-400 USD with an idea of setting up in house cloud, then realized, it is waste of money, they lack storages, RAMs and network speed, planned to sell them off again, now I use Hetzner cloud (billed by hours), I spend only about 10 Euros with multiple VMs running only few hours, then remove them off.

    I am trying to see if I can get through netcup RS offers in future, reduce Hetzner cost by half.

  • reading the thread and how expensive some guys have to come through, and I thank all the gods WSL is just enough for me.

  • Mr_TomMr_Tom Member, Host Rep

    Ive ran Debian MATE on a VM (on one of my dedis) which worked well, other than when the internet connection was too slow. 7mbps down/0.7up was a little laggy.

  • What are people running Linux using as the Terminal Server/RDP server?
    So far I've found Thinlinc to be the one that works most consistently.

    Sure nomachine is slightly faster but Thinlinc seemed more reliable.

    Thanked by 1cendiosamuel
  • @dragon2611 said:
    What are people running Linux using as the Terminal Server/RDP server?
    So far I've found Thinlinc to be the one that works most consistently.

    Sure nomachine is slightly faster but Thinlinc seemed more reliable.

    Take a look at Xpra (https://xpra.org). It can work really well in some cases and I use it a lot to run single gui apps in containers, both locally and remote.

    The limiting factor for it seems to be whether the server has the grunt to handle the video compression and it works much better on faster servers.

  • gksgks Member

    I have one question to community about netcup.

    Can I use netcup root server (RS 2000 G8) 480 GB SAS with Mint/Ubuntu Desktop and Remote Desktop and Run Big Data application that takes 100% on all 4 dedicated cores?
    Is 480 GB SAS shall be faster than Hetzner Intel Core i7-4770/7200 RPM HDD?

  • @dragon2611 said:
    What are people running Linux using as the Terminal Server/RDP server?
    So far I've found Thinlinc to be the one that works most consistently.

    Sure nomachine is slightly faster but Thinlinc seemed more reliable.

    I use X2go with my linux remote desktop.

  • @letrocks

    I use a Xen Linux VM for my daily work workstation. I am using Xfce4 on Debian and use Xrdp-o-matic for RDP access to the instance (which now has installable packaged on Debian based systems - 'apt-get install xrdp'. If needed you can setup pulse audio to pipe audio to you remotely, but this isn't by default setup for you. So if you need audio it takes a few extra steps. In my case the sounds hasn't been necessary for what I do, so this has worked out great. However, some things in Linux are a little memory leaky (Chrome) so I have gone to using a VM with 16GB ram on my own hypervisor just so I don't have to deal with memory limitations, however, it can be done with a very small server if you need (just don't open 100 tabs :p ).

    my 2 cents.

    Cheers!

    Thanked by 1letrocks
  • XxDanxXXxDanxX Member
    edited August 2018

    @PcJamesy said:

    Really tempted, found a working $10 off first month promo ROMF9XOR

    Their FAQ leads me to believe you need to bring a windows license for the server. Anyone here have any experience with them?

    Hey There!

  • @oneilonline said:
    ...did I say windows? Or should it have been VNC...? Same thing isn't it? Remote Desktop Protocol.

    Remote Desktop Protocol kinda implies Windows since it was created by Microsoft for Windows. :)

    The VNC protocol is called RFB not RDP.

  • @letrocks said:
    Is this a popular idea? Has anyone tried this?

    I'm curious what you ended up doing. I was originally drawn to LET because I was looking for something similar. I ended up using a hybrid approach because Iow-end VPSs didn't entirely really solve all my needs.

    You mentioned a need for ML work so I am guessing you may need GPU support. I have a similar need. I ended getting a high-end workstation which I have modified for my needs. I also bought a high-end laptop for when I travel. For cloud VMs, I use AWS but I plan to migrate some of the VMs to low-end providers.

    Because most of my code runs in docker containers and I use git in the cloud, I can pretty much work from anywhere with my laptop. I plan to use Kubernetes in the future for container orchestration. I leave my primary workstation running when I'm away so I can remote into it if I forget anything or if I need the horsepower. For me - this was the most effective approach but my budget for this setup is a bit higher than yours.

    @willie - thanks for the tip about Paperspace. I hadn't noticed their offerings before. Looks interesting.

  • @birchbeer said:

    I'm curious what you ended up doing. I was originally drawn to LET because I was looking for something similar. I ended up using a hybrid approach because Iow-end VPSs didn't entirely really solve all my needs.

    I rented Hetzner dedicated server, however latency was unbearable. Also all the US dedicated servers were costing too much money. For the time being I have nuked windows on my home workstation and installed the Ubuntu only. Also enabled the port forwarding from router to my home Linux VM for SSH access. (not directly on port 22).

    You mentioned a need for ML work so I am guessing you may need GPU support. I have a similar need. I ended getting a high-end workstation which I have modified for my needs. I also bought a high-end laptop for when I travel. For cloud VMs, I use AWS but I plan to migrate some of the VMs to low-end providers.

    Because most of my code runs in docker containers and I use git in the cloud, I can pretty much work from anywhere with my laptop. I plan to use Kubernetes in the future for container orchestration. I leave my primary workstation running when I'm away so I can remote into it if I forget anything or if I need the horsepower. For me - this was the most effective approach but my budget for this setup is a bit higher than yours.

    For ML part, I also have GPU at home. I am also exploring some of the cloud ML offerings from AWS. The cost will very affordable for the on demand basis.
    The idea is to use the AWS end to end using Kinesis, Glue, Athena, ML etc.. All of those items gets data in and out of S3. I attended one day workshop on AWS on that par

  • ChristianDSHChristianDSH Member, Host Rep

    @oneilonline said:
    Uhmm...there was a thread not too long ago, ok, maybe it was long time ago... with a poll asking how many people work via RDP. This also enabled working from multiple locations and not having to close anything.

    I think in your case, @ 5mpbs, it would SUCK. I think your priority should be getting a better ISP ;)

    Believe me or not, but im for vacation in the philippines, sometimes i only have like 2mbps download, still i can work flawlessly on my remote desktop in germany.

    On windows server 2012 / 2008 at least, 2016 seems a little bit laggy at this network speed.

    However using anything else than rdp (for example nomachine) lagged like hell on that speed.

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