Still on AWS? I Went With a Domestic Server — A Beginner's Guide to Landing on a Rental Server

Browse the web or YouTube and you'll find no shortage of big-tech server talk. They do look good. But for a beginner like me, spinning up a server there turned out to be harder than expected. This post is the true story of how I ended up on a domestic rental server, plus the price comparison I collected along the way.

1. The days I was renting a room on my brother's server

This homepage started out on my brother's server. The site he runs is joinc.co.kr, and he's been operating it for nearly thirty years — he built it when I was about twenty-four. If you're a CS student or just curious about Linux, stop by sometime when you have a minute. There's a huge amount of material there.

I rented a corner of it and put my homepage up. My brother was running a domestic service called Tongkeunai Server. Living rent-free was comfortable — I didn't have to worry about the server at all, because he handled all of it.

2. Why I moved out — one sudo command locked me out of root

When you run a homepage, you eventually end up poking at the system. I was fiddling with sudo permissions for security, used them wrong, and locked myself out of root. My brother couldn't get into the server either, and neither could I.

The one saving grace was that I'd set up SSH key access in advance. I could still get in with the key. Truly lucky. But a problem remained. I needed to make system changes and had no sudo permissions to do it. I was in, but couldn't fix anything. So I made up my mind: this was the time to get a rental server of my own.

3. Trying the big tech players — why does everyone want a card?

I started by looking at the big names. Amazon, Oracle, Google. The specs were uniformly good. But I got stopped at the very first gate of sign-up. Registering a card is mandatory. Nearly every overseas service wants one. For someone uneasy about cards, that was a burden from step one.

Oracle advertised "always free," so I tried signing up. Whether it was my fault or not, at some point the screen just stalled and wouldn't let me through. Later I started to wonder whether it had been set up that way deliberately. Well, nothing's free in this world.

It turned out Oracle sign-up is notoriously rough. The table below is what I ran into.

My screen stalling wasn't entirely my fault.

4. My four criteria

So I searched hard. Here's what I wanted:

1. Cheap
2. Easy to sign up
3. No card registration required
4. Bank transfer available

Number three was the crux. Almost no overseas service skips card registration. I had to find a domestic one.

The one I found was https://my.yourit.co.kr/ — the official member page where sign-up, management, and payment all happen. At first I was suspicious: "they sign you up and then upsell you on paid stuff like forwarding, right?" They didn't. They genuinely wanted nothing from me, and the service went live immediately. And the operations are remarkably transparent. For reference, the plan I'm on has 2TB of traffic. Having used it, I think it's great.

5. Domestic VPS price comparison (from official pages)

Here are the entry-level VPS prices I collected, domestic and overseas. All figures are from official pages.

It's exactly what you see. On starting price alone, YourIT's 4,500 won/month satisfies my first criterion (cheap) without doing any math. Cafe24 adds a 22,000 won setup fee on top of a 9,000 won entry price, and Vultr looks cheap but assumes card registration.

Overage traffic rates differ too. YourIT charges 100 won per GB (VAT excluded) and doesn't shut the service off even if you go over. Cafe24 charges 165 won per GB. What scares a beginner when traffic blows past the limit is what it does to the wallet, and that rate difference matters in practice.

6. The free perks table — the real price that isn't on the price list

From YourIT's "20 free perks," here are the ones a beginner actually feels. All amounts are the officially listed equivalent values.

On top of that, the running promotions are 80% off server hosting, up to 50% off for new sign-ups, and free server migration. The "they sign you up and upsell you" structure I was suspicious of becomes obvious once you look at this table. There's no need to fish with things like forwarding. They genuinely wanted nothing from me, and the service went live right away. The operations are genuinely transparent.

7. Settling in — up in five minutes

The accessibility is almost too easy. Five minutes from service activation to setup complete to launch. That's it. It's almost anticlimactic that it fits in five lines. For a beginner like me, there's nowhere better.

For reference, I checked the company details too. SB Korea Co., Ltd., CEO Kim Tae-young, a rebrand of the former HiHost. Eleven years in operation, 50,000 cumulative client companies, 99.9% availability listed. Not a corner shop — a properly run company. Detailed specs per plan and exact quotes are available right from the official online quote tool (https://yourit.co.kr/server/quote).

8. A Mac mini personal server versus one rental server

Now that people are putting agents on servers, some folks keep a personal server on a Mac mini. That's a fine path too. But my take is this: rather than doing that, it's better to just make a server here and manage it. You learn from it, and above all, the price is unbeatable.

A rental server can break. You can wreck it. One snapshot and it's back. That "I can beat on it without consequence" feeling is better than any textbook for a beginner. A Mac mini is something you have to keep precious at home; a rental server is something that exists so you can break it. If it's for learning, the latter is the right call.

9. Beginner checklist (my own list of mistakes)

First, make your SSH key on day one. That's what saved me. Turn off password login and use keys only, and you'll sleep better at night.

Second, back up sudoers before you touch it. That's the lesson from my root-lockout incident. Copy the original before changing a single line — just that habit alone will reduce the number of times you need to strike out on your own.

Third, check for cardless payment. With bank transfer, you can only spend what's in the account, so there's no worry about a surprise bill. For a beginner, that's a safety net.

Fourth, trust the five-minute launch, but just play on day one. Don't put your site live the moment the server opens. Create, delete, create again. The real value of a rental server is that you're allowed to break it.

Closing

If you're still asking why not AWS, my answer is that I use a domestic server. A server of my own with no card, bank transfer only, open in five minutes. Having moved out of my brother's server, this one small rental server is my entire homepage. If you're a beginner, don't waste time circling the big players — get your hands dirty with something small. You don't learn server administration from a spec sheet. You learn it by breaking things yourself.