On Sun, 08 Jun 2025 19:09:27 -0700 Keith Smith via PLUG-discuss wrote: > Hi, > > Currently I am running Kubuntu on a 10 year old Dell that I upgraded > to 16GB of RAM (Years ago) and an SSD drive. > > I have an old laptop running Win10 that came with a NVMe SSD and I > have since upgraded to 16G of RAM and I added a 500G laptop hard > drive (I have several just laying around). > > > On the Win box I installed VirtualBox which allows me to create > different vhosts (lamp). I also use the Win box for recording videos > as well editing. Can you find Linux based programs to create and edit videos? This would be an excellent time to free yourself of Windows for good. > > I wrote an Amazon S3 PHP SDK script that allows me to backup my > production websites. > > I was thinking at some point in the future I was going to build a > monster computer to do all these things. > > Now I am thinking I can buy a simple shared hosting account and > offload the VBox. I can make a subdomain for each of my projects and > configure my Amazon S3 PHP SDK script to backup each project I doubt any kind of "cloud" (somebody else's computer) will compete with what you call a "monster computer". Given that you've been working just fine with a couple old computers with 16GB RAM and 500 to 1000GB of storage, I imagine a regular 6 core, 12 thread computer with 64 GB RAM, 1TB NVMe and 10TB 72RPM spinning rust will do you just fine. I put one of those together in 2020 for about $2200, but today such a computer is pretty much a commodity, so you can probably do it a lot cheaper. I normally keep my computers for 5 years, so that would be less than $500 a year I spent on my computer. You appear to keep you computers twice that interval, and the computer would probably cost you $1800 (would have been less before all this tariff bullshit), so you'll be paying $180/year for what you would think is a blindingly fast computer that you can still be using 10 years from now, long after your current two computers are unable to run a current browser. And as far as your shared hosting accounts, those things get sold, and the new owners destroy them, and your data becomes unavailable to you but available to bad guys, and the price of shared hosting will probably increase with time. Oh, and backups: If your win10 machine has a USB3 port, convert to Linux, plug in a (non-seagate) USB driven hard disk, and use rsync. > > I still need to record and edit videos. If you absolutely, positively can't record and edit videos on Linux, then you need to buy a pretty good Win11 machine, and take the hit when Win12 replaces Win11. > I'm thinking I only need a simple laptop at that point - 4 cores, 32G > of RAM, and an SSD drive, running Kubuntu. You can probably buy that hardware used, for under $600.00. Extra points if you have a desktop format so you can actually repair, maintain and enhance it. SteveT Steve Litt Spring 2023 featured book: Troubleshooting Techniques of the Successful Technologist http://www.troubleshooters.com/techniques --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list: PLUG-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: https://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss