I went this route and got taken over by hackers multiples times. It was very worth it. I got taken over by hackers because my password for ssh was "mars". Me and my little brother were sharing it and wanted an easy password (yeah we have ssh keys now).
Anyways, we both learnt a lot (htop tmux etc) . I'm always jealous that he got to learn everything earlier than me. But if he's not better than me then I consider myself a failure wrt being an older brother.
The only drawback is that this doesn't work if you want to do ai stuff. For those use cases I rent a machine on paper space for a cheap hourly rate.
I'm a little sad I never was. I started with the Linode "hardening linux guide" and so had a firewall and disabled ssh passwords from day 1. I still have fun looking at the failed attempts on 22 and 443. My server gets so many weird requests, and they used to crash the server. A few iterations and that stopped happening.
Oh, another thing that's worth learning: how to acquire and refresh a Lets Encrypt TLS cert via the ACME protocol. Doing this requires interesting confluence of skills and tools - you must carve out a vestigial http route in your server, and also configure certbot and cron. And working out the bugs takes a few iterations. (You could install Caddy, but where's the fun in that?!)
Making it all work, from scratch, made me feel happy in the same way that when I watch people rebuild carburetors or who build bookshelves from scratch makes them feel. It's not new, it's not innovative, but its good. And it's always more interesting than you'd ever suspect.
I thought I had been once, and got a very scary email that came from my own domain, claiming to have gotten into my things, and I fully assumed it was the VPS that got hacked. After calming down and raiding the shit out of everything I realized it was just plain old domain spoofing. Both disappointing and terrifying at the same time!
There is a lot of value in learning things the hard way vs the easy way if there is no real significant harm caused, I think. In many cases you learn more or gain a deeper understanding/respect for the topic, which is worth something in its own
Anyways, we both learnt a lot (htop tmux etc) . I'm always jealous that he got to learn everything earlier than me. But if he's not better than me then I consider myself a failure wrt being an older brother.
The only drawback is that this doesn't work if you want to do ai stuff. For those use cases I rent a machine on paper space for a cheap hourly rate.