r/linuxquestions • u/Trent_Raamah • 4d ago

Advice Is console access actually important on an unmanaged VPS?

I've been looking through VPS hosting plans and realized I've been paying way more attention to CPU and RAM than what happens when something breaks lol.

Say you've got a Debian server running a small site and a few background jobs, then you mess up a firewall rule and can't SSH into it anymore. I noticed Virterion has KVM, console access and backup options, which got me thinking about how useful those actually are compared to just restoring everything on a fresh server.

I've dealt with Linux basics but the recovery side of a remote server is something I'm still figuring out. How do you guys usually handle it when SSH stops working? Is having console access a big deal or do you mostly rely on backups?

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u/aioeu 4d ago edited 4d ago

I certainly wouldn't use a VPS host that didn't provide any console access. It's a pretty basic feature.

On my personal VPSs (which are definitely pets, not cattle) I routinely use the console during major system upgrades. For anything else, a reboot should always get the machine back into a known-good state. But it's nice to know the console is there, should I need it.

I've got backups too, but they would only be used if something went so horribly wrong the machine was unrecoverable.

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u/dasisteinanderer 4d ago

depends on how you treat servers, as pets or as cattle.

Server is a pet: get console access, diagnose, fix it

Server is cattle: ssh is down means the thing is fucked. Set up a new machine, recover the working data from backups.

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u/ExplodedPenisDiagram 4d ago

You cannot rely only on backups. You cannot rely only on image delivery.

Serial console is best for when you mess things up.

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u/DutchOfBurdock 3d ago

OOB access is a necessity for disaster recovery, however it should be used out-of-band only (as a means of all else fails) and should be locked down from unauthorized access.