Migrating to Hetzner

In 2014, I stopped maintaining my own physical server—an actual computer that I actually owned, and could go and visit upstairs.

At the time I wrote:

At the same time as I made this switch, for the first time I am serving ruk.ca from a server that I don’t own: since the site went live in 1999 it has been served by a series of owned-and-operated PCs. In the early days these were housed in the basement of my house at 100 Prince Street; more recently the server, known as “ross” internally, has been based in silverorange’s Fitzroy Street data center.

At the time, I’d just moved this site, and its cousins, to Amazon Web Services (AWS). This made sense: I was maintaining a fleet of servers for Yankee at AWS, and so I was in and out of the AWS dashboard every day, and it felt like home.

As I’ve written here previously, AWS started to get expensive, and while I was able to tweak things to lower costs, they were still upwards of $125 a month, and that seemed unreasonable given current cash flow. Because I’m no longer working with Yankee, I didn’t have the tethering to AWS that I once had, so I used the opportunity to move elsewhere.

So, as of this morning, this site is hosted on a Hetzner Cloud server in Helsinki (for the technically minded, it’s a CPX31 server, with 4 VCPU, 8 GB RAM and 160 GB of disk). In theory this should lower my hosting costs from the $125/month I’m paying now down to about $20.

The migration has been mostly lovely: the Hetzner Cloud website is both delightfully simple and delightfully capable. 

Migration will continue for the next week or so; until then I’ll be straddling two worlds. But by mid-month I’ll have divorced AWS and fully re-homed in Finland.