get a vps and run tailscale

8/24/2025

land

this week i finally followed pieter level's advice from twitter

pieter tweet

the advice is basically:

  • single cpu vps's can handle a lot nowadays
  • they're cheap
  • they're easy to manage
  • rent one and run whatever on it

so instead of navigating the gross/overengineered (for your relatively small service) aws/gcloud/azure console or whatever - or going full managed with vercel - like i do with this website -

you just get a raw little ubuntu instance and do whatever you want on it

my brain thinks of it like renting a little plot of farmland to grow little vegetables

here's a little vegetable

running tailscale

tailscale is super easy and everything just works

  • its free
  • makes life easier for communicating/ssh'ing/managing my digital ocean droplet
  • just run tailscale serve to run privately to my devices
  • just run tailscale funnel to expose on the internet

granted i don't have much firsthand experience with an established company's IT network and running something on that

but I feel like this is way easier and the way to go

I accept maybe being naïve here


my vision

I can easily see within 5 years just having some sort of vps - mixed with on prem maybe - infra where claude 10 just goes nuts

  • listens to meetings
    • someone says 'itd be cool if we had X'
      • literally just decides to spin up a vps or a container on an existing machine - link it up with tailscale
        • by the end of the meeting its like 'heres that thing you asked for'

again idk how this would look in a big corporate environment but doing this on a team/startup scale seems not hard

  • if internal only: auth is taken care of at the tailscale level - you just configure the acl to the people/groups/subnets that you want to have access
    • i guess you still have to think about user role segmentation of the service but
  • dont have to worry about traditional firewalls and stuff

all i know is that i've seen with my own eyes where someone needs access to a machine or something and IT can't even grant it themselves - they need to email the consultants they've outsourced networking/firewall management to open a port/add a machine to a network

  • and the whole process takes >1 day

absolutely fuck that

back to my vps

so like pieter says you literally just do the basic setup (guided by claude if you want too), install claude code on it, and ask it to do anything


i think im going to elaborate about this on another post but i just put an example sqlite file (data dump from a coworker's real life master excel sheet for one of his main workflows) on the vps and asked claude:

hey i have this sqlite file in this directory, we're running on a little digital ocean droplet, we've got tailscale set up, i want to run a mcp server on top of the sqlite file so i can connect claude.ai to it - here's the current fastmcp documentation for self hosting an mcp server - go for it

one shotted in 2 mins:

  • mcp implementation
  • running tailscale - giving me the link to copy paste into claude web interface

this week im going to put some sort of auth on top of it so i can share with my coworker and be like: here have claude run all your analysis for you through the web interface


also this is my first time ever doing any sort of linux/server admin stuff even though its super basic so thats pretty fun too tbh

tangential and have a bigger post about this anecdote floating in my head i may write about but

it reminds me that in my second facebook internship i heard the term EC2 for the first time from my manager and I had no idea what it was

i feel like this helps me overcome that sort of weight of checking off on my developer list: ok i know how to set up a basic ubuntu instance and run something on it and access it from the internet