I use, among others, 1and1 Virtual servers. The base package runs $30 a month and includes 4-core xeon, 8gb ram, and 160gb SSD drive. It runs Ubuntu Linux (or for extra $, Win 2012 server). There is also a management interface that lets you automatically backup your image on a daily basis. Restoring from backup was, the one time I have had to do it, fairly simple. You can upgrade the base package on an a-la-carte basis for extra ram, diskspace, etc. I pay about $60/month total, mostly for extra diskspace and ram.
Thanks everyone, now I'll go back and do the legwork! Any additional things I should consider that I failed to list? Main reason is that it sounds like I have a non-compete period coming up and I am considering #vanlife. In which case, I'll rent my place out and have no place for the server.
I've never dealt with this technology, could you elaborate a bit? PM me if this too involved for this thread
They also offer domain registration in the same stop, which is nice. I just discovered that a bunch of coffee shops around the US and Canada do not like connecting to numerical IPs, which means I need to have a domain of my own :/
All you need to do is set up a Google cloud account and create a "compute instance" (a server on the Google cloud platform) with the server specs you laid out and you will have the setup you are looking for. It wouldn't cost you any more than $50 per month. https://cloud.google.com/compute/
I second GoToMyPC. I use it daily to run my program when I am away from my desk. It is extremely reliable, and I can login on my iphone or any PC. Every cloud solution that I tried was either too slow, or two expensive.
As I understand it, people/companies use this tech to set up consistent development platforms for all the developers to ensure everyone is developing on the same exact setup as everyone else. It basically makes it fast and easy for everyone to be on the same page. It's nice to use for anyone that needs a consistent development setup, and it keeps things separate from the system installed stuff, a plus especially for python work. Many people use anaconda for that reason in the scientific community, or virtualenv in webdev. Vagrant is working with VM's so you need to install virtualbox. Docker is a linux container (sometimes described as chroot on steroids), but both essentially do the same same type of thing, just using different technologies. Here are some links... http://datasciencetoolbox.org/ - this is a vagrant image for data science but informative on what its about. https://www.dataquest.io/blog/docker-data-science/ - same here for docker with a tutorial. https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials - digitalocean has a massive tutorial section for anything to do with vps. Yeah a lot of it is for webdev stuff but plenty of info regarding things you might need to deal with.