Since I began working on self-hosting, I’ve been using a DigitalOcean (affiliate link) VPS running Debian 10. However, after investigating the alternatives in the space, I’ll be moving to Hetzner Cloud when my DigitalOcean credits run out in six months. Here’s why.
I went with DigitalOcean as my hosting platform primarily because of the USD$50 credit included with Github Student. I’ve used USD$20 of that credit as of today, and the remaining money should run out around April 2020, giving me almost a year of VPS for free. Not a bad deal.
With that said, as my credits hit the half-way point, I’ve begun to think about what’s to come. Namely, the fact that my current server is running at a constant 80% memory usage – severely limiting what I can self-host.
Money talks…
I currently use the cheapest DigitalOcean VPS available. I have 1 vCPU, 1GB of RAM, 25GB of SSD, and 1TB of data transfer. All that power is packed in a clean USD$5 per month. This is, as far as cloud hosts go, pretty good bang for your buck. Hetzner blows that out of the water. Take a look at this table:
| USD/Month | vCPU | Memory | Storage | Traffic | Provider |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $3.41 | 1 | 2GB | 20GB | 20TB | Hetzner |
| $4.77 | 2 | 2GB | 40GB | 20TB | Hetzner |
| $5.00 | 1 | 1GB | 25GB | 1TB | DigitalOcean |
| $6.70 | 2 | 4GB | 40GB | 20TB | Hetzner |
| $10.00 | 1 | 2GB | 25GB | 2TB | DigitalOcean |
Check out the math on that, seriously. Hetzner’s base tier offers 1 vCPU, 2GB of ram, 20GB of SSD, and 20TB of data transfer for USD$3.41 per month. That’s double the ram and 20 times the transfer for almost half the price of my current DigitalOcean droplet. The fourth down in the table above, the one I plan on purchasing, costs USD$1.70 more than DigitalOcean and has quadruple the performace of my current VPS. That’s more than even Docker could need. Ok that might be a slight exaggeration, but it’s still a lot.
…and it speaks for the trees.
Hetzner is a green hosting provider, as certified by the Green Web Foundation. DigitalOcean is not. Obviously, climate change is important. If we look at it objectively, it’s one of the only extinction-level threats to human existence at the moment. All that is to say that switching to a green hosting provider is the only thing I need to do according to this online website carbon calculator, and you know I can’t resist online website metrics.
So that’s nice.
Anyways, that’s a pretty good summary of my thoughts on the move. I’m probably going to use the move to make a few other changes to my hosting setup (i.e. docker-compose to k3s, umami to plausible). I’ll keep you all abreast of the latest updates to my hosting in future posts.
Until then, this is FIGBERT signing off. I should make a more consistent outro.