dan

joined 2 years ago
[–] dan@upvote.au 4 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

They have far fewer perks, so it's not as common.

In Australia, most credit cards have an annual fee, and they pretty much all just offer frequent flyer miles. US cards have much better perks: Quite a few offer 2% cashback, cards with points offer more points than Aussie cards, they almost all include extended warranty and rental car coverage, some include mobile phone protection, etc. If you pay it off in full every month, you get these perks for "free".

Of course, merchants pay the price for these perks, given the high fees to process credit cards. They can make merchants pay a 3% fee, pay 2% cashback to customers on some of their cards, and still make more money from card fees than they would in other countries. Visa and Mastercard used to require merchants in the US to not charge any extra fees for accepting credit cards, but after a big lawsuit, this is no longer the case. Stores are slowly becoming like Aussie stores - charging extra if you pay by card.

In the US, it's also very important to build up your credit score, as this affects loan rates for mortgages, cars, personal loans, etc. Most people build their score by getting a credit card as early as possible and using it often.

[–] dan@upvote.au 10 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

It'll probably work how it works in Australia. Payment terminals accept both the local network (EFTPOS) as well as Visa, Mastercard, etc. Aussie debit cards are processed via EFTPOS, while international cards use Visa/MC/whatever. Aussie cards are dual network (support both EFTPOS and Visa/MC/whatever) so they work overseas too.

[–] dan@upvote.au 47 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (11 children)

We've had this in Australia since the 90s at least. All debit cards are dual network: They support both Visa/Mastercard, as well as the local network (called EFTPOS). EFTPOS is noticeably cheaper to process - around 0.3% fee, compared to ~1% for Visa/Mastercard debit in Australia, ~1.5% for credit, and ~3% for Visa/Mastercard in the USA. The profits stay in Australia rather than going to a US company.

That's only for debit cards, though. EFTPOS doesn't support credit cards.

[–] dan@upvote.au 29 points 1 week ago

I see it a lot, too. Reddit's been around for 20 years, so all the good usernames are already taken.

[–] dan@upvote.au 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Since you're using Hetzner, one option is to get a Hetzner storage box to store the media. 1TB space is $4/month (not sure about EU pricing). You can mount the storage on another system via NFS.

On-disk cache prevents a "thundering herd" problem when you reboot - an in-memory cache would be empty on rebootz whereas an on-disk cache survives a reboot. Linux handles caching files in RAM automatically.

[–] dan@upvote.au 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

they can be uploaded to S3 (object storage) where it is 10x cheaper to store them

This is heavily dependent on the VPS. Some of my VPSes are cheaper than object storage would be.

[–] dan@upvote.au 2 points 1 week ago

RAM is a good idea. You could put the cache in /dev/shm.

Anything loaded from disk is going to be cached in RAM anyways.

[–] dan@upvote.au 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Even if you build your own thing to communicate with the AC, Home Assistant is still useful since it lets you easily automate things and interact with other devices, and you get a bunch of things included (nice UI, storage of historical data, dashboards, etc). You could build your thing as a Home Assistant integration.

[–] dan@upvote.au 12 points 1 week ago

Companies are throwing away old hardware (like 8th/9th gen Core i5) that's perfect for running Home Assistant. See if there's an e-waste recycler near you - they might let you buy an old system for a nominal fee.

[–] dan@upvote.au 10 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (13 children)

Use a page caching plugin that writes HTML files to disk. I don't do a lot with WordPress any more, but my preferred one was WP Super Cache. Then, you need to configure Nginx to serve pages directly from disk if they exist. By doing this, page loads don't need to hit PHP and you effectively get the same performance as if it were a static site.

See how you go with just that, with no other changes. You shouldn't need FastCGI caching. If you can get most page loads hitting static HTML files, you likely won't need any other optimizations.

One issue you'll hit is if there's any highly dynamic content on the page, that's generated on the server. You'll need to use JavaScript to load any dynamic bits. Normal article editing is fine, as WordPress will automatically clear related caches on publish.

For the server, make sure it's located near the region where the majority of your users are located. For 200k monthly hits, I doubt you'd need a machine as powerful as the Hetzner one you mentioned. What are you using currently?

[–] dan@upvote.au 55 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone... The five eyes (and nine eyes) nations all share data about their residents in the name of "stopping terrorism".

[–] dan@upvote.au 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

If your current setup works well for you, there's no reason to change it.

You could try Debian in a VM (virtual machine) if you want to. If you're running a desktop environment, GNOME Boxes makes it pretty easy to create VMs. It works even if you don't use GNOME.

If you want to run it as a headless server (no screen plugged in to it), I'd install Proxmox on the system, and use VMs or LXC containers for everything. Proxmox gives you a web UI to manage VMs and containers.

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