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Course Module 02: Evaluating VPS Providers for Production
What actually matters when you pick a VPS for a self-hosted network stack: logging policy, network quality, hardware, billing flexibility, ToS analysis. Comparison frame for DMIT, BandwagonHost, RackNerd, Vultr, Hetzner, Lightsail.
This is module 02 of the RouteHarden Network Engineering Course. Picking the wrong VPS provider is the single most common reason a self-hosted privacy stack falls over — either the network is too slow to be daily-drivable, the logging policy is worse than the ISP you were avoiding, or the ToS makes the deployment quietly unstable.
By the end of this module you will be able to:
- Read a VPS provider's ToS and privacy policy and predict whether your account survives 6 months
- Compare providers on logging policy, network quality, hardware, and billing in a single matrix
- Pick the right provider class for each geographic edge of your stack
- Know when to use commodity VPS, premium-route VPS, residential proxy egress, or bare metal
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Network architecture review, self-hosted privacy stacks, zero-trust corporate VPNs.
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