It does hurt, your VPN should support proper port-forwarding for soulseek to work well. In most cases, you will only be able to download files, but your shares will be inaccessible. It doesn’t seem to work with ProtonVPN for example, even when you built-in port-forwarding feature. And even if it did work, you would need to reconfigure and restart soulseek every time you reconnect the VPN, because their port-forwarding is randomizing the ports and there’s no way to turn that off.
Yes, the cheapest ones might have some risks, I mostly presented it as an example of what the opposite extremity looks like. There is a lot in-between, something a bit more expensive is even more guaranteed win. For example last time I used Hetzner, I had a server with 64gb RAM, 2TB SSD, and 16 cores Ryzen for something like €34/month. Hetzner support is very decent and they’re very well known, have decent reputation and been providing their services for a long time.
I’m talking about 3d software one, and author obviously talks about that one too.
Maybe the problem is that they are using ridiculously overpriced enterprise services like AWS or Azure, which provide their own solutions for a lot of common things like backups, replicas, logging, etc, but cost 100x more than what you can get with DIY on some cheap VPS if you’re fine with spending 1.25x more time.
Also, given that the instance is called “infosec.exchange”, you can be sure that he is not running this on some cheap VPS.
Why not, though.
I wonder why it needs so much money for infra? Last time I rented a VPS it was €7/month for 8 Core Xeon E5 V4, 12 GB DDR4 RAM, 150 GB SSD/NVME, Unlimited Traffic, 1 Gbps Port.
If Blender had a patreon or coffee or kofi, I would happily subscribe to something like $3/month. I know artists that have tens of thousands of paid subscribers and their minimal plan is $3. Blender could achieve hundreds of thousands of paid subscribers eventually imo. To make things interesting, they could release prebuilt binaries of some subprojects like NPR fork, only to subscribers, also they could do partnership and paid plugin giveaways every month to subscribers. It just needs a bit of dedicated SMM work. One-time donations just don’t hit the same. I do those maybe once a year or two, and don’t do another one until I get the feeling “it’s been a while”.
Cool idea, I almost forgot this feature even exists. I think I dismissed it the past when I realized it’s probably not going to be easy to switch VPN servers this way.