Bare-Metal vs. VPS vs. Serverless: Choosing My Battles

On a daily basis, I see teams defaulting to the same standard answer: a vintage bare-metal box or a VPS is “the fastest path” to solving all infrastructure problems. Even on modern hyperscalers and cloud platforms, people spin up virtual machines and treat them like virtualized 2000’s tower servers.

I get it. We are human. We stick with what feels familiar, what we know, and what already works. If it works, why change it… right?

Well, not for me. I never did like following the crowd.

Why I opted out of the server babysitting business

It boils down to a simple tradeoff: I want to spend my time writing content on this website, not managing it’s underline infrastructure that bring no value to you as a reader.

Don’t get me wrongI have spent decades architecting, building, and hardening large-scale server infrastructures. I know how to configure firewall rules, optimize Linux kernels, and tweak NGINX. But for a personal web home, I don’t want to spend my free time thinking about:

• OS patch cycles and kernel updates.
• Hardening SSH keys and managing firewall rules.
• Babysitting NGINX configs and debugging Let’s Encrypt TLS renewals.
• Monitoring disk space, backups, and uptime.
• Dealing with “it worked yesterday, what the hell happened now?” runtime dependency updates.

I’ve paid my dues. I’ve woken up to enough 2 AM alerts in my life. I still enjoy complex ops work when it’s the core of the project, but for skhell.com, the infrastructure is not the interesting part, writing and sharing content is.

I wanted actual simplicity:

• Fewer moving parts.
• Fewer components that can fail.
• Fewer operational decisions to maintain over time.
• A workflow where I write Markdown, run git push, and walk away.

Since I have trusted Cloudflare to protect and accelerate my projects since 2012, deploying to Cloudflare Pages was an easy choice. I get high-availability edge delivery, automatic SSL, and instant git-based deployments out of the box. The platform handles the boring details in the background, leaving me to focus on writing code and essays.

Because at the end of the day, the best infrastructure is the one you don’t have to think about.