IT'S A VIRTUAL SERVERWORLD

From his caravan in a field in North Wales, David Rutland takes you on a touring holiday through the world of virtual private servers.

- David Rutland

The future is in the cloud, they say. But whose cloud? Google? Microsoft? AWS? Why not your own? There was once a time when people ran their own servers from home – under the stairs, in the back bedroom or from a lovingly kitted out homelab in the stripped-down carcass of the garage, meaning the vintage BMW restoration project is left to moulder on the drive.

A server is a simple beast at heart. It’s a computer (usually running Linux), with an internet connection, which receives requests for resources such as pages and serves them back to the machine that made the original request. Server. It’s in the name, innit.

But servers serve far more than web pages these days. There are progressive web apps, content management systems, databases and a whole host (geddit?) of other toys you may want to play with.

Some of these demand serious investment in terms of time, hardware, power consumption, and if you or your partner are light sleepers, noise becomes an issue, too. In fact a properly specced home server with adequate cooling often sounds like a jet taking off – so it’s time to take your server virtually off the premises.

What is a VPS?

If you’re determined to run your server away from home in order to avoid unnecessary concerns about power bills, antisocial noise, and so on, there are a few options available: