When I first dipped my toe into the murky waters of cheap VPS hosting, I was armed with confidence, a budget of $5/month, and absolutely no idea what I was doing. My goal? Host a simple web app. My reality? Hours of panic, dozens of Stack Overflow tabs, and the sobering realization that port forwarding is not as magical as it sounds.

Chapter 1: The Linux Learning Cliff

I started with a cheap Linux VPS hosting plan. It was fast, affordable, and came with root access—which is just a fancy way of saying, “you can now break everything instantly.” After locking myself out via an overzealous firewall rule, I humbly rebooted and re-read every SSH tutorial known to man.

Chapter 2: Windows Woes

Thinking I’d simplify things, I tried cheap Windows VPS hosting. Turns out RDP is just as finicky as SSH when your firewall has a grudge. After setting up a server that was 90% updates and 10% usable desktop, I missed the command line and ran back to Linux like a prodigal sysadmin.

Chapter 3: Managed, Please

Then came salvation: cheap managed Linux VPS hosting. Someone else handled the updates, backups, and the terrifying sysctl tweaks I used to blindly paste from forums. Sure, I missed breaking things myself, but I also enjoyed sleeping through the night without cron job nightmares.

Chapter 4: Storage Panic

In a moment of brilliance (or sleep deprivation), I spun up a cheap storage VPS hosting plan to back up my blog. I quickly learned that “cheap” and “unlimited” are mutually exclusive. Also, that backing up 100GB over a 10Mbps link is a great way to relive dial-up trauma.

Chapter 5: Container Confusion

Finally, I tried a cheap container VPS hosting service. Docker inside LXC inside a VPS is the nerd version of Inception. It mostly worked—until it didn’t—and I spent 3 hours trying to figure out why port 8080 wouldn’t open, only to realize I never exposed it in the container. Classic.

Moral of the Story

Cheap VPS hosting can be amazing… or an anxiety-inducing maze of broken ports and broken spirits. Whether you need Linux, Windows, managed, storage-heavy, or containerized VPS setups, just know this: panic is temporary, but /etc/hosts lasts forever.

And yes, I eventually got the app online. It’s only crashed twice this week. Progress.