I've been operating my commercial VPN for about 3 months now, and here's what I can tell you:
- 1-2 times a week I get abuse reports from hosting providers
- sometimes entire accounts get banned (today for example), and suddenly 10 out of 20 servers go down
- users abuse the servers and download huge libraries of video content
- not to mention that every day some of my servers get blocked in certain countries
- marketing turned out to be the easiest part
- I have 5-6K users online
- I've already lost count of how many nodes I have, but it's around 40: 20 active and 20 in testing/reserve
- I've leveled up in DevOps (I still can't code)
- now I know words like fleet, Terraform, node, Ansible, Docker, containers, Marzneshin, CI/CD
- backups are automatic, and once a week they're also restored in a test environment
- I have automatic server weight rotation based on load
- nodes are automatically taken out and brought back depending on their health
- fleet expansion is semi-automated
- I migrated from SQLite to PostgreSQL, and now I even understand (I think) the strengths and weaknesses of each db
- In Telegram, I have a Hermes bot that automatically handles support
- I also have a Server Admin bot there that sends notifications and lets me quickly spin up a couple of new nodes
For most people here, none of this is anything special, but I still keep being surprised by it. I never thought I'd be doing anything like this, but so far it's pretty interesting.
I even tried bringing in a DevOps engineer, but I ended up finding and fixing issues faster than they could send me their audit.
So for now, I'm still doing it myself.
