A VPS makes sense insofar as keeping things thoroughly isolated from my own systems, but the overhead of maintaining a box that’s directly connected to the Internet like that isn’t something I’m keen on and I’m not convinced I’d have the expertise to do it right from the outset.
OK that’s genius, I will definitely look into that!
This reminds me of working for a UK developer back in the PS2 days. From what I remember, one of the coders there wrote a tool that enabled the comparatively cheap QA test kits that would only boot from a CD/DVD to appear to dev PCs as full blown dev kits (that cost 4 or 5 times the price) and boot code pushed to them over the network.
They didn’t have as much memory or processing grunt so there was still need for a few proper dev kits, but it saved them a fortune in hardware costs. Pretty sure it was an open secret that Sony reluctantly allowed, and most of the UK dev studios were using it at one point.
Are you my brain? This exactly the sort of thing I think about when I say I’m paranoid about self-hosting! Alas, as much as I’d like to be able to add an extra box just for that level of isolation it’d probably take more of a time commitment than I have available to get it properly setup.
The attraction of docker containers, of course, is that they’re largely ready to go with sensible default settings out of the box, and maintenance is taken care of by somebody else.