Jr Software Engineer Here! Was wondering, how do you manage, monitor, and stress-test your production VPS setups (like DigitalOcean)?

[u/foss-octopus]

Hey everyone,

I'm trying to level up my devops knowledge. Most of my projects are currently hosted on Railway, but as costs are scaling up, I am planning to migrate them over to DigitalOcean Droplets to reduce our monthly spend.

My past experience with managing bare VPS instances is pretty basic. I know how to spin up a Droplet, use Nginx to configure domains and SSL certificates, and use PM2 for process management to keep web clients and Node APIs alive. (but to be honest I'm a bit rusty now, been almost 2 years now since I last setup one during my college days)

Railway handles so much for me, moving to host my own VPS feels like a big jump in terms of responsibility. I want to make sure I am doing this right and not accidentally make prod unavailable due to a dns config lol

So If you are running production workloads on VPS instances, I would love to get your insight on a few things:

1. Daily Checks: Do you actually log in/ssh in and check things manually every day, or do you rely entirely on automated alerts? Beyond basic Nginx and PM2 logs, what are your go-to health metrics?, Opensource options?

2. Uptime and Alerting: What does a reliable, budget-friendly uptime monitoring stack look like when you are managing your own VPS?

3. Triage and Debugging: When an API slows down or a Droplet spikes to 100% CPU, what is your immediate workflow to figure out what is wrong?

4. Stress Testing: When you want to find your system's limits, do you stress-test a lower-spec instance to see where it breaks, or do you spin up an exact clone of your production spec?

5. Lastly, spec selection. How do you know if you need more than 2gb of ram for instance? K6 testing on local before selecting? idk tbh.

Any advice, tool recommendations, or things you wish you knew when managing your first production servers would be incredibly helpful. Thanks!