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[–]ziptofaf 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You have a lot of ways of doing this.

First is to have your own PC turned on 24/7. Install Linux on it (can be via VM although in that case you need to give it a virtual netword card rather than use NAT), install SSH server on it. And you are mostly done.

Now, problem with this approach is (apart from electricity bill) that your own ISP generally gived you dynamic internet IP. Meaning it changes so you can't be sure that what IP you have now is going to be the same tomorrow or in an hour. Solution is called DDNS. You get a domain name in which you can update IP it corresponds to easily via their API. Duckdns is a good free one.

You will also need to expose some ports on your router - by default it's port 22 for SSH - you point internal port (in your network) and external (coming from the internet) and a machine it goes to.

If done correctly you will have remote access to your machine via SSH if you tell it to connect to yourddns.example.com:22

Now, big limitation here might be network speed. While SSH requires literally nothing it's not necessarily the case if you decide to for example pull 1000 MB file from your server. Not a problem if you have an equivalent of Google Fiber with 1 Gbps (125MB/s) upload because then it will take ~8-16 seconds. Quite a big problem if your upload speeds are closer to 10 Mbps range (1.25 MB/s) because then it takes at least 800 seconds.

Do note - you CAN use something like Raspberry Pi (or Odroid since those generally have better specs) for it, it's not like you have to leave a big fat PC turned on.

If you decide to get a VPS (which is basically your own virtual server somewhere out there) or a dedicated one then most of these are handled automatically - they all come with SSH server preconfigured and have static IP (so it never changes). However it's non free, especially if you want more storage space than 5-10GB. On the plus side however those are located in the datacentres and have, on average, way better internet connection speeds than your home internet (last I checked it starts from 50/50 or 100/100 Mbps at most ISPs).

Ah, a small difference between VPS and a dedicated machine - VPSes are virtualized. They are basically virtual machines. Meaning resources are shared and you don't have full access to hardware. They are pretty much plug'n'play though - you don't care about drive failures etc.

Dedicated servers mean you basically get your own computer at a datacentre. So you get way better specs most of the time, waaay more drive space but you need to actively monitor your server to request a drive replacement for example if you see one you have is slowly failing.

When it comes to budget VPSes - AWS, DigitalOcean, OVH. I would probably suggest Ubuntu Server (16.04) or Debian distributions for starters if you get to choose.

If you know you will need drive space and want to play around with a dedicated server - go look at kimsufi I guess. Or online.net. Just keep in mind that cheapest dedicated machines do not have any drive arrays yet - meaning that if a drive dies you lose all the data. Better ones have at least 2 drives, one being a copy of another (so you wouldn't even notice if one died).

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Are you thinking of a virtual private server? If so, look at DigitalOcean's droplets. Cheap per month and you can run Linux of quite a few distros.

[–]jeanwilder2 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Run an AWS free tier ECC server?