Right, I’m back to focussing on Domain* now that another round of dev is complete on Kitten** and, two years after I originally asked the question: does anyone know of a comparable service to Hetzner Cloud (API, affordable, very quick server setup, VPS) that supports CoreOS?
I still can’t find any. And my attempts to get Hetzner to support it have failed (mostly due to lack of interest on Fedora’s side) 🤷♂️
Looks like Vultr has it but it’s too expensive. We’d have to charge at least €25/mo instead of ~€10/mo for a Small Web site with Hetzner to make the same ~€5/mo to try and make Small Technology Foundation sustainable.
And I really want Small Web sites to be affordable so folks can experiment and play with them.
@aral At some stage, and if you have enough tenants to justify it, you might want to acquire your own physical server or two and build out your own VMs. Of course, that brings other issues, but is worth considering.
@omz13 Thanks, David. Definitely an option for the future. But I’ve got so much on my plate as it is at the moment so I really need this to be outsourced to begin with or we’ll never launch :)
@omz13 Also, since the goal is to hopefully have other organisations become Small Web hosts too eventually, I’m trying to make it as easy as possible for that to happen :)
@aral want to go in on an Oxide Computer rig and build this? They start at around 100k I think? (Not suggesting this as a "you should simply…" - I've been genuinely interested in running a VPS co-op on free hardware & software for a while, in case you're also tempted in that direction)
@ryanprior Oh wow, that’s a sweet piece of technology :) Definitely not something we can afford at the moment but I can see how we might eventually. Heck maybe they’d even help us out a bit given we’re a not for profit.
I’ve bookmarked this and something tells me it’ll be at the back of my head now… thanks :)
@aral yes they look so freaking sweet. My inclination is to find 3-10 like-minded people to form a co-op, pool funds to buy hardware, and launch the service. If I started an every-3-months interest meeting, would you want an invite?
@ryanprior Maybe it’s also time to have a chat with @peter again (I’m getting closer – finally – to launching the hosting side of the Small Web, Peter.)
And maybe you two can chat about Ryan’s idea too 👆
@aral I see. Then after creating the server you may want to take a snapshot of it and remove the VPS. You can use this fresh snapshot to create new VPS. However I haven't figured out a way to re run cloud init on servers started that eau from the snapshot. My solution was to hop to Debian.
@dragnucs Thanks. Yeah and plus server setup from a custom image is orders of magnitude slower than the optimised server images Hetzner has for Ubuntu, etc.
Setting up a server and then installing CoreOS is out of the question. Small Web sites have to be set up in under a minute.
Must be affordable. We need to be sustainable while not charging more than €10/mo.)
EU-based.
Right now, it seems I’ll have to go with Ubuntu although I really don’t want to as I want the rpm-ostree auto-updates in CoreOS to make the sites zero admin as possible.)
@aral to solve the setup time issue, would it be possible to create a pool of servers in advance? I could see this being unviable due to additional expense or being beyond the complexity budget.
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