Sorry for the lack of posts as of recently, the past few weeks have been hectic, with a bit of writer’s block sprinkled on top.
As you might have seen a few days ago on my social media, I’ve been discontinuing tons of services, and servers, lately.
So far, I’ve either replaced services with a managed alternative, or completely discontinued them.
Basically, the basics for myself remains, Vaultwarden, my GitLab instance (with two runners), ActivityPub server and PBX, while the rest has been (almost) completely deleted.
Some stuff was moved more locally, that’s the case for my Immich and copyparty instances that were moved to a spare computer at home (though still mirrored through another host).
We say farewell to all too many projects that I should have guessed I wouldn’t have the energy to maintain: Resonite Observer, Rexo Network, AS211696 and a bunch of others.
As I mentioned in a previous blog post, the e-mail responsibilities were moved onto Posteo and Sweego (for transactional ones, after being dropped randomly by Mailtrap, shame on them), but much more has been moved as well since.
One hard thing to do was to find a WordPress managed host that had two criteria: being cheaper, or at least as cheap as the Hetzner VM that it was running on (4€ a month), and have IPv6. So far, most of the popular hosts, including WordPress themselves, do not include v6; one or two do, but I’m not paying 20€ a month for just this blog, it’s too much for what it is.
While rambling about this on ActivityPub, a green cat friend pointed me in the direction of Pawhost, which is a small (and quite obviously furry-owned) German hosting provider with web hosting starting at just 1.5€ a month.
Oh yeah, did I mention that I’m kind of stupid? I totally forgot that any web host having a Plex panel or similar has some degree of WordPress integration, which means any kind of web hosting could have worked. I only realised that while I was migrating this blog around.
In any case, I think I’ve landed on a good provider, IPv6-native and cheap, just like I wanted. Some stuff wasn’t working exactly right (WordPress plugins-wise) after the migration to the new host, but luckily, I had enough energy for this kind of troubleshooting.
But why do this? Why move away from self-hosting for all of this?
The first reason is easy, energy. I’ve spent the past 5 years spending my days maintaining servers and services I was hosting and as I’ve said before, I’m tired nowadays. It’s impossible for me to spare the energy to reconcile work, friends, hobbies and constant maintenance of software. I just want to focus on making my things, with software that just works, without having the headache of having to completely maintain something.
The second reason is just money. Hosting that much stuff on that many machines, across that many domains, has a huge cost. Adding on top of the previous reason, I don’t really want to pay to maintain something that causes me some serious stress online.
And so far, it’s working out fairly well for me. I don’t have to worry about as much stuff any more, and can focus on things that I actually enjoy, which is working so far.
Writing on this blog for instance, for years I just couldn’t sit for five minutes just to write, it was always interrupted with something, or I had to do something else. You can notice the uptick of bog posts when I seriously decided to improve things around here.
In any case, I’m happy with where everything is going, and I’m more at peace than ever. I’m also definitely looking forward to this year’s EF, can’t wait to meet everybody once again!
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