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Hosting providers


Right now superstimul.us is hosted on a Vultr VPS instance. I use Vultr because it's a decently reliable VPS host that offers OpenBSD (though this instance is running in Docker on a Debian system). Much cheaper than AWS; comparable pricing and features with many other VPS providers.

But I just went looking at the prices of competitors, and Hetzner is cheap. How is it so cheap? For roughly the same price I'm paying for this host, I could get ~8x the vCPUs and RAM, and 4x the storage.

It would be a hassle to migrate at this point, but I'm definitely tempted.

This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

Everything I've heard about Hetzner has been great. It seems like their strategy is to build their own servers and seriously compete on price. My guess is that they'll eventually raise prices, but probably still be cheaper than average.
in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

Some things to be aware of regarding Hetzner:
1. It's *even more* cost-competitive if you participate in their dutch-style server-capacity auction (a neat idea):
- hetzner.com/sb/
- docs.hetzner.com/robot/general…
- There is also open-source tooling to automate interaction with the auction.
2. Have no illusions that such infrastructure is physically secure against interference (fun example at: notes.valdikss.org.ru/jabber.r…), and account for such in your threat model if/as appropriate.


Some praise for the behind-the-scenes tech I'm using to run this site


  • Tailscale: Lightweight personal VPNs. Tailscale is so good. I don't even need to have an open ssh port on the VPS running this instance, because I can connect over tailscale SSH with zero hassle.
  • Caddy: Caddy is like nginx if nginx cared about usability. e.g. it makes it trivial to put an HTTP service behind a TLS proxy. Like, it even manages the LetsEncrypt certificate for you. Totally wild.
  • Docker, and the official Friendica images especially: I hate developing for containers, and avoid it when possible. But when someone else has put in the effort to make a high-quality container image, deployment is genuinely much easier, even for hosting the thing on a VPS.
This entry was edited (2 months ago)
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