Comment by 🚀 stack

I guess without a GUI you need a lot less. The damned browser needs gigabytes.

Aug 25 · 4 months ago

16 Later Comments ↓

I would be comfortable running a headless system in 512MB of RAM. Biting my nails the whole time but still

“CGI” is up to your gemini server. You can just as easily program your entire capsule in C and write a listener.

Do not buy a certificate or use one from certbot.

You will learn the hard way – as many have – that this is retarded when every single person visiting your capsule starts getting errors. Gemini is TRUST ON FIRST USE. When the certificate changes, THAT is when it is assumed something is compromised. It is not dependent on a certificate authority like the Web.

Any VPS will work fine for your purposes because gemini is very lightweight and the amount of traffic here is smaller than the web.

Good luck and ask any questions you have. We are eager to help.

tl;dr

The Elites don't want you to know this but certificates are free. You can generate them. I have generated 458 certificates. [alexjones.jpg]

I had no idea there were so many cheap vps providers. like a dollar a month. But chances are they will suck as bad as the tildes i've been using...

I pay something like $45 for two years through CrunchBits. 3 cores, 80GB SSD space. It’s had one week of downtime in four years when the node broke and they needed parts, but still no data loss.

I’ve been very happy with it.

crunchbits: unable to order -- out of stock?

ionos -- order page does not load fully, gave up

oracle: could not find what I wanted and gave up after a few minutes. Don't really want to deal with Oracle-flavored everything.

google: would never give them my credit card.

Gah. The more I look the more my eyes glaze over and I think to myself: my requirements are so close to 0 as to be a rounding error. It's almost as someone should pay _me_ for the headache. I am giving up for today.

Check the old LowEndBox site. They still post lots of VPS deals in the range of $15-$30 /year.

Watch out. All the lowendbox deals seem to be 'specials', like $150/yr with a $120 first year discount.

I almost signed up following another link talking about a $2.25/mo deal, put in a credit card, but noticed last-minute that it was $28/mo, not per year...

Woah. Be careful! I’ve never seen a switch like that.

They most definitely are not *all* like that. I grabbed one linked from them through HudsonValleyHost that was something like $18/yr paid in full with recurring discount. Used it for a while.

Have used a number of their advertised plans over the years and never seen anything like what you described unless it was a link to an offer that already ended.

If you are sure they tried to bill you $28/mo you should report it to the site so hopefully they never advertise that VPS again.

I think it was mostly my ADHD. I followed a link from a very old reddit thread and was not paying attention.

That sounds very possible. If it was any ad from the actual LowEndBox site in the last 30 days that would be wild. But something advertised years ago the price could be anything today.

I just tried to sign up with netcup (German), but received an email that I am required to verify my identity using a device with a camera. So much for this low-priced option.

DigitalOcean?

I thought I'd give Oracle a try -- tired of dicking around with unknown clowns. But oracle.com seems to be down for the last hour! They are aware of the issue, thank god.

Spent a couple of hours trying to set up an Oracle account. Between the server going down and being rejected for no real reason, tried 3 times. Now there is an open ticket and they will get back to me within 48 hours. Great. I really didn't want to deal with that ****hole, but a free tier got the better of me.

So now 3 random places have my credit card to be leaked at some future date, and I got absolutely nothing.

Just in case you're still shopping for a VPS....

I'm happy with my $2/mo RackNerd VPS. They have specials going on all the time like this 1 vCPU/1 GB RAM/20 GB SSD for $10.96/yr:

That should be way more than enough to run a small Gemini site, or even a small Web site if you care for that.

Original Post

Help: a minimal VPS Gemini server with CGI — I am considering getting an OVH VPS for $5/month to run a Gemini server. I have many questions, and appreciate your feedback. Which servers supports CGI and are minimal/easy to manage? Preferably written in C. Can I generate a certificate for Gemini or do I need to buy one somewhere? I would like to avoid registering a domain name and OVH gives you a permanent IP address. Is that workable? Anything else you can think of I should look into?