Almost 10 years ago I purchased a Synology NAS for local storage and backups. I was really happy with the ease of use and their support is top notch. I got it set up and didn’t think much about it. Fast forward and a deal on a used server comes around and all the sudden I have a lot to learn. Proxmox, TrueNas, Nginx Proxy Manager… a whole new world I had somehow never even thought about. The concept of virtual machines blew my mind. Spin up a machine, mess it up, tear it down, repeat. Kids wanted to host a Minecraft server. No problem, pterodactyl. But wait, pterodactyl wants to be installed in a machine that doesn’t have any other software installed. No problem, I got one of those! This is magic and I’m loving it. I mostly lurk around here but thanks to everyone who posts because this place is a great source of knowledge and sarcasm and I appreciate both!
I do have cubecoders amp running as well. And, I agree, setup was easy and I have a bungee cord server running on there now. I don’t mind paying a reasonable one time price for well supported software. The only reason I am also trying pterodactyl is the integration with databases directly in the panel. I wanted to try a few addons for the Minecraft server and they require regis and sql. Still working on getting it all setup but I also read that database support is in the pipeline for Amp so I’m looking forward to that.