It's an actual entire machine given to you. I remember there were a few options for me from Ubuntu, Debian to Red Hat to choose from, but all of them would also have preconfigured system users and some level of administration done by the provider.
But other than that, it's an actual bare metal machine and I installed Ubuntu on it and threw in a giant heap of services that have been running on it for more than a year now.
If you could rewind the clock, would you have started setting it up any differently, like in a container?
I am just curious what your options would be now if you wanted to migrate. Would you just copy your bash history to a local text file for reference, and then repeat the steps on a new server?
No, I wouldn't have started differently and I like the performance and the dedicated hardware I get for the money I spend. I have a custom backup solution that will upload daily backups of all my data to remote drives and I should be able to restore the setup on another machine without much problem.
Generally even in containerized deployments, you run one container per service/process. You wouldn't run everything you’d run on one box in one container.
I definitely recommend using docker compose or similar even in a one node deployment versus just installing and running things on the host linux system like it’s still 1998. Having a single directory to back up and a single file defining all of the services that can easily be redeployed is very convenient.
What is the performance impact? Going one page into Google results, I found this paper. Is there a better reference?
> At light workload levels, the native host performs better than Docker. However, as the workload
increases, both Docker and the native host show similar performance, with the difference getting smaller
But other than that, it's an actual bare metal machine and I installed Ubuntu on it and threw in a giant heap of services that have been running on it for more than a year now.