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Hetzner was good for me, but I went all-in on bare metal, with no looking back.
Hetzner recently skyrocketed the pricing of their VPS offerings.
How did you do that, self host? Co-locate?
My guess would be renting a dedicated server, or a home server. It can end up cheaper than colo.
Hosting at home, renting a dedicated server, or colocating are all considered self-hosting.
I may need to do a proper write up on that one, as it’s quite a long story actually. The main thing is, though: it’s hard to believe how actually good modern hardware is. You can do a lot with a Raspberry Pi, not to say Mac mini. Over the decades, I accumulated some old hardware which serves till it would break. And then I’d replace it with similar hardware, I guess. E.g. I have a media server, which is a simple lighttpd web server running on an obsolete Intel Atom computer. It’s slow, but it does its job at serving files. I have old MacBook Pro hosting my Immich library.
All that is rather a self-hosted territory, but I’m pretty confident I can host a production grade stuff off my own hardware. I have been using the cheapest options at DO/Hetzner, so I definitely can host off a maxed out Mac mini or similar.
All that lives at home, or in the office (I am allowed to have some hardware there). I think the main restriction is the gigabit internet… but hey! That’s plenty too!
If I’d ever come to some serious level of hosting, yes, I think I’d co-locate at some data centre. I see very little need in cloud services, as all I need can be done with the bare metal. And it’s so much fun! Feels like magic, seeing an old laptop you’d throw out otherwise, serving as what would be a full-blown server just two decades ago.
Definitely true. The Pi 5 is especially powerful compared to older versions, but it can get kinda expensive once you add things you'd want for a server, like a case, SSD hat, etc.
Ex-office mini and small form factor PCs (Lenovo Tiny/ThinkCentre, HP ProDesk/EliteDesk, Dell Optiplex, etc) can be a better deal than a Pi. In the US at least, you can often find 9th or 10th gen Core i5 systems for less than $150 on eBay. Works great as a server.
A lot of companies have a 3-4 year refresh cycle, after which the hardware is fully depreciated (essentially meaning its value to the company is $0) and they have e-waste companies collect them. The e-waste recyclers test them, refurbish the ones that still work, and list them on marketplaces like eBay.
Unfortunately, where I am, prices aren’t that generous, but I have an unusual interest in very old hardware, so most of my servers can be bought for like $20 or less. Most of them are junk hardware nobody needs. They’re very useful for many cases, especially if we talk self-hosting / personal servers. I bet you can easily serve a small community with a $20 computer. Recently, I started being very picky about power consumption (we have massive blackouts here in Ukraine, due to the Nazi terrorist state, Russia, shelling our civilian infrastructure; but not just that: power efficient hardware is better for the planet), but one thing that isn’t obvious: you can keep the hardware off when unused. It’s trivial to turn it on, or wake up, depending on the use case.
So, if anyone new reading this, I urge you to try this with any spare computer you can find. You may be surprised how good it may work with Linux (server or even desktop).
Their auctioned baremetal servers are a steal