[sAmI]

Hello there, Hope everyone is doing fine in this ongoing pandemic.
I'm asking you guys two questions

1. How was your first experience with your first VPS! 
2. How was your experience with your first Free VPS (obtained from somewhere)

i'll write mine a bit :
My first VPS was actually  my Free VPS It was i guess 2012-2013, At that time Swift Panel was so famous like everyone use to host it. I was so dumb i thought hosting it would get me a Game Server, So hosted, I got my first VPS from Haphost having 128MB RAM and 128 Swap Memory and 10GB Disk with 100 or maybe mbit port. I literally spent like 9 hours on PC straight didn't slept out of excitement that i actually got a VPS and then i installed centos 5 i guess. Logged into the VPS and literally was just literally looking at the screen now what i do. Watched a youtube tutorial how to install Swift Panel and i literally copied each and every word and they did not provided any type of notepad with commands in the youtube so literally i wrote those links so many times i ilterally remembered epel repo link with every "-" "/". that made me learn different aspects of linux like hosting stuff websites and many different things.

List of Free VPS i have used in past :

1. HapHost (Had a really great experience got alot to learn for start)
2. FreeVPS.US (Contributes a really great part in my learning stage, Learned many things from people there and admins and mods!)
3. Post4VPS (Current! A really nice , decent and friendly forum. Gonna stick here for a good time)

Stay Safe Everyone!
Regards,
sAmI

[Shaun8]

Hmm, this actually got me thinking about my first experience with using SSH and connecting to a VPS. Kinda embarrassing how little I knew about servers and hardware at that time. Granted, I still have to learn much more in depth about it but at least now I can say that I know my way around utilizing and managing game servers.
The specs of that VPS were 2 GB ram and 10 GB SSD which were enough for my needs. It was actually owned by my friend, and he gave me access to it for setting up a game server. Things like port forwarding, root permissions and wrong architecture were my biggest obstacles at that time. This wasn't really "my" VPS but it was my first time using a server.
The first free VPS that I got was from AWS student program. It took a while to set up the starter account with which I could access the AWS management console. Side note: AWS is really weird with their student program. It's managed by a third party company Vocareum that creates your IAM account for you to use. They deny you to access support requests and many other parts of the console. On topic, it was a good learning experience. I understood many aspects of commercial servers and monitoring your usage, etc. I wouldn't recommend others to get AWS student account due to issues with the console and their credits system.
Anyway, that's just my opinion. Have a nice day.

[Honey]

My first experience was way back in 2013, I was really young at the time barely 12, and I used to play a multi-player mod of gta vice city. After playing there for a while I eventually had an interest in developing my own server and for that I needed a vps.

Thats when I stumbled upon these post4host sites, My first one was managed by a guy called Conan and The VPS had like 512 mb Ram and like 5 gigs of storage. At that time, these specs were really all that I needed. That vps server as a great learning tool and I really learned alot about command line experience and stuff.

I gradually increased my vps specs to what I have today and ofcourse the forum from where I started doesnt really exist anymore but that's where I began

[deanhills]

My first VPS experience was in December 2014 with Gigarocket. Gigarocket had launched its first VPSs and I was given one to try out. I felt like a kid with a new toy. At the same time also fingers and thumbs as I didn't have a clue how to manage it. The Chief Admin of Gigarocket mentioned Putty, and so I was able to get into the VPS and start my journey with learning how to manage it. Mostly through Googling tutorials. Size of the VPS was 512 MB RAM and 10 GB Disk Space. It came with a Virtualizor Panel. I remember for the first month of learning I must have reinstalled the OS 20 times or more - I remember it was CentOS. While I was trying out a few Panels. I eventually settled on WEBUZO at 25 US$ a year license. WebMin dragged as 512 MB RAM is a bit little for a panel. VestaCP was still in its infancy and not very user friendly at the time. WEBUZO came with Softaculous so had a similar feel to cPanel, but that is as close as it came to cpanel. There were plenty of shortcomings to work through. I managed to work my way through them and stayed with WEBUZO for a year or more. As years went on VestaCP became my choice of panel because of how light it is with Nginx and of course it is free.

[tbelldesignco]

I remember mine was in 2012, it was a free VPS I got from a friend running Windows Server 2008 R2 and I was using it to run game emulators and I had a game website hosted through it as well. I had 100GB of storage and 2GB of ram and I was constantly playing with it. I also was fairly new to web management so I installed an exchange server on it and thought it was the coolest thing ever. I later had a 10GB Ubuntu Server with VPS Link it was 20$ USD and had 10GB of storage, 128MB of Ram and 5GB of bandwidth if I remember correctly and I used it to run a media server and started building my first CMS on it trying to learn the ins and outs of C and Objective-C to build a server for an app. I think I was able to pick what OS I wanted on it and I switched from Ubuntu to ElementaryOS which was awesome because if was built on Ubuntu and was supported by the panel.

[tryp4vps]

I got my first free VPS around the year 2015 from the FreeVPS.us forum. It was also my first VPS.

I still remember at that time HR was the Giveaway Manager on the FreeVPS.us forum and he did help setting up my first VPS there.

It was an OpenVZ VPS with 1 GB RAM and 40 GB hard disk. The VPS was running so smooth and I did keep holding this VPS for a long period of time until the sponsor stopped its services.