I recently wrote about Digital Ocean deciding to donate $3 million dollars to a racist’s pet linux project. In that post, I said that I would be migrating off of Digital Ocean as soon as possible, because I did not want to support a company that chose to prop up a racist. I completed the migration to a Hetzner VPS yesterday, and deleted my Digital Ocean account.

Ersatz.website is now running on a podman-compose Caddy stack in a Hetzner VPS. I’ve never used Hetzner before, but so far I am pretty pleased with their interface and options. My first choice would have been Linode, but they got sold to Akamai a while back and were no longer an option. I’ll have to write a future post about diagnosing and fixing an issue trying to get Caddy to do a DNS challenge for Let’s Encrypt. It ended up being a very silly DNS problem, but the experience of puzzling it all out was sort of educational. More educational than frustrating at least. I also took the opportunity to change DNS registrars while moving the site to a different provider. I’m using porkbun now.

Currently all the traffic to the site is being served directly through Caddy acting as a file server. The site is totally static, so that is pretty straightforward. In the near-ish future I’ll be looking around for a CDN to use so the VPS I am running on doesn’t fall over in the event a post on here escapes containment. Unfortunately the easy option of Cloudflare is a no-go becuase they have also chosen to support DHH and his racism. Bunny is a possible option for a CDN that looks very affordable, but most importantly has a lot of knobs for spending limits. I’m not in a big rush to get connected to a CDN right now though.

Hetzner doesn’t offer any kind of monitoring / alerting out of the box, so I am also looking into standing up some light weight options to keep an eye on things around here. Running prometheus for metrics collection along with a grafana dashboard might be a nice option but will require me to get a VPN set up so that dashboard isn’t available on the public internet. Until I figure all that out I am just doing some very basic heartbeat monitoring through a free betterstack account. I don’t think I’ll stick with them long term though as they are more geared toward actual application monitoring and not smol-bean static site monitoring.

It feels good to finally be free of Digital Ocean. I was a little sad to leave though given that I’ve been doing business there off-and-on for something like a decade now. I’ve recommended them to people. The situation sucks. I’ve also learned recently that Digital Ocean are screwing over CSS-Tricks right now. Don’t even get me started on when their former CEO said his mentor was a KKK member. Everything combined made the choice to leave an easy one. I urge others to consider that same choice for themselves if you rely on companies that are making bad choices like Digital Ocean or Cloudflare.