Why VMs for Self-Hosting?

While I personally recommend going with a mini PC for the long run, they’re not the only option, especially if you’re not ready to commit to a hardware purchase just yet. Virtual machines (VMs) give you a flexible, low-commitment way to get into self-hosting and experiment before investing in something physical. Here’s why:

• Not tied to your home Wi-Fi
  Unlike a mini PC sitting under your desk, a VM in the cloud isn’t connected to your local internet. If you’re worried about exposing your home network, or just don’t want to deal with port forwarding headaches, a VM neatly sidesteps that.

• No home internet bottleneck
  It’s possible that your home Wi-Fi is slow af. With a VM, you’re running on data centers with much faster and more stable connections. That means people accessing your service won’t be stuck waiting because of your ISP’s upload speeds.

• Easily scalable
  One of the biggest selling points of public clouds is how easy it is to scale up or down. You can usually just click a button to get more CPU, RAM, or disk space.