When hosting on my own machine, should I use a virtual machine or not?
When hosting on my own machine, should I use a virtual machine or not?
Hey all,
Just wondering what the consensus is on hosting directly on a computer versus virtualization? Right now I'm hosting my Lemmy instance on a Hetzner VPS, but I would like to eventually migrate to my Linux box at home. It currently runs as a media PC (Ubuntu) in the living room, but I always intended to self-host other software on the side since it should be more than capable of doing both (Ryzen 5600G, 16gb DDR4).
I'm just torn though - should I host a virtual machine on it for Lemmy, or run it directly on Ubuntu as-is? I plan to do some further self-hosting projects as well later down the line.
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Only time you dont use virtualisation or containers would be if real time performance is critical. Eg: a firewall inspecting packets in/out or some other service or appliance where small delays can impact performance. Same kind of reasons why gaming on a vm is never quite as good as a bare metal machine.
Performance is not the only use case though:
Using virtualisation (containers included) adds a great level of overhead to the system which can be problematic on low resources hosts. It also adds a layer of complexity that one might not want to deal with when hosting a service.