Tell HN: Switched from Lightsail to Hetzner Cloud, 2 blogs for $4 a month
After a few comments mentioned I was probably wasting money using AWS Lightsail, I finally tried out Hetzner Cloud for hosting my Ghost Blogs.
Since ARM is new and interesting, I picked the 4$ ARM Ubuntu server for hosting. After experimenting with a few different alternatives, I installed Captain Rover again( it's still the easiest solution here).
The only thing I really had issues with was getting the A records to work right. I had some weird franken system where I had the domains on a different register, pointing to AWS name servers, pointing to Hetzner Cloud.
This was really confusing and didn't work right, so I migrated the domains over to AWS. I'm happy to say both of my blogs are working fine now.
Both of these are near no traffic blogs, so I have no idea how this would behave under load. 4$ is a great deal compared to the 30$ a month I was spending before.
Whenever I have time I can see myself using Hetzner for other projects. Thanks HN.
In this technical retrospective (2024), @999900000999 shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.
HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.
Why didn't you try a barebones AWS EC2 with their Arm offers as well? Last I checked nothing beat them, especially if you reserve capacity in advance.
Another option is buying a $5 Raspberry Pi Zero and hosting the ghost blog from there since the blogs don't have any traffic.
I tried to sign up in Hetzner but always got rejected. Also, the idea of providing my ID/Passport to them is odd. I’m running stuff on Digital Ocean without having to hand over any IDs or using my real name. So far, so good.
Why are you paying for blogs, ostensibly static content, at all? Vercel and Netlify are both basically free for both. I use Hetzner too, but only for application services, not static content.
Why are the blogs on running application servers at all? You could build them locally and host them on S3 for close to $0/month and load would be a non-issue.
Digital ocean is good enough for this. You would be trading the power/$ ratio of Hetzner for probably an easier DX with more regional options.