Most people have yet to discover what a tiny little machine can do if you spend some time addressing bottlenecks. I have fond memories of running websites on the cheapest VPSs I could find, and getting very respectable performance from them with little more than cutting down on resource-hungry services, going static html whenever possible and being vigilant about any resources loaded by the browser.

See also https://lowendbox.com/ and https://hackernoon.com/10-things-i-learned-making-the-fastes...

I run a couple of very small scale (mostly static content) web sites and E-mail serving and a few other services on a single "Cheapest VPS" and have never gotten interested in Puppet or Ansible or any of the other things mentioned in this thread. It just seems like adding abstraction and automation on top of things that are not worth abstracting or automating. To me, these things are Yet Another Software That Could Fail. When I need to change a configuration file, I ssh in, sudo vi /etc/blahblah.conf and get on with my life.

I just use versioned Makefiles for my very simple personal projects with my artifacts and configs in git. Pull the repo to the box, and run the make file. I commit config file changes then pull and make as needed. Everything is simple, it's manual automation so there is nothing running, but it's repeatable.

I put the bootstrap into an OS package and my server images point to my personal repo so I can configure run and build time dependencies as needed. At the end of the day, I can get a new server, run update, install my package and walk away and everything should be running, but it takes almost no additional overhead over doing it all by hand the first time.

I also was never interested in Puppet, however I was only interested in Ansible, and only use it as sort of an automated check list when setting up my server, in case I need to rebuild the server, the tedious steps can be automated. But I've never used it for multiple server management.

So what happens when the hard drive fails and you lose all the data and configuration on the box?

Avoiding the huge, fast-changing software for configuration management doesn't mean you can't have CM or high availability on cheap boxes. The OpenVMS approach (see Section VI) combined good filesystem, clustering, optional OS-level virtualization, and distributed lock manager to have clustered systems that ran for years without downtime. Record was 17.

http://h41379.www4.hpe.com/openvms/whitepapers/high_avail.ht...

Those few building blocks done in a highly-robust way on one of the stable, Linux platforms could probably achieve the same thing. Just RAID 0, a good filesystem, clustering itself, and backups would get far. I know there's Linux-oriented products out there but I don't know if their availability or failover time have caught up yet.

My VPS host fixes it and I restore from backup.

That’s what RAID and daily backups are for.

Yep. I got to say to my boss recently "you know those 2-4 servers I requested? You can forgot about that now, I optimized some things and we have plenty of capacity now on the one machine we've been using." That's an easy conversation to have.