As an avid hobbyist of self-hosting and server maintenance, There is this taught in all minds that AWS always provides the best uptime and all the maintenance of the physical hardware is taken care of by the provider. I don’t have to worry about the maintenance. Also as I am away from home I can’t be running my Raspberry Pi in my temporary stay location. Thus having the Raspberry server was not the best option for me currently. So I started exploring options.
One of the the best service providers was Amazon so I signed up for the AWS services. I got a ton of features free for the first 12 months. So I looked at the ec2 instance to try. But the problem with the ec2 instance was that the price was not fixed. Yeah, I could use it for free for the first 12 months. But still, I am planning for the long term here. So the EC2 was not on my list.
Next, I took a look at the lightsail. Even though it was only free for the first 3 months and then it was paid. The cost is a fixed price. I get all the features that were said in the terms. But it is not elastic like the ec2. It doesn’t scale like the ec2. If there is a huge amount of traffic the system throttles. It suits best for my use case and I planned on giving it a try.
The next task was selecting the best package for the server. I also have the budget to look after the Raspberry Pi cost me Rs 7500. So the expenses must not be much higher generally for a simple server that does the same task. So I took the $5 plan to start with.
Next after the installation of Ubuntu its operating system. I started replicating all the things from my Raspberrypi to the server. The same access controls. Created new users for docker with specific privileges. Added a new sudo user cause the sudo user which came with the system was not able to change the password. Thus created a new sudo user and gave access to be able to access it from ssh. Used tailscale and disabled the port 22 firewall rule. I don’t want any ports to be open in my system. Used Cloudflare tunnel to make open services public to the internet. I trust them that they don’t read ay data of mine.
Everything was good. The was server was working perfectly until on the second day 12pm noon it started to run on 100% of its CPU power and using all its burst performance. This made the system unresponsive I couldn’t connect to the server through ssh or none of the services were working. I tried to restart it multiple times and still it was waste. This was going on for 3-4 hours and then everything was back to normal. This happened multiple times a day. I couldn’t figure it out why there was a sudden spike in the CPU usage. This doesn’t happen in my raspberrypi as it is a 4core device and this system is 2v CPU. The CPU utilisation graph has been attached for the reference.
Will update by trying other options.
Update : Went back to my raspberry pi server because the lightsail server was weaker than my pi in terms of CPU. Sometimes any background service raises the CPU utilisation to 100%. But that never happens in my pi so went back to my pi server.