Iām using Digital Ocean right now, and there are some things I like about them and some things I donāt. Mind if I ask your opinions of your old and new hosts?
Not at all, Iāve been using Digital Ocean for years and still do for some sites. Their admin panel is fantastic and they have a lot of really convenient features (one of my favorites that I miss is their CDN, Spaces, and how seamlessly it handles SSL). I recommend them still for ease of use, but have been moving away for 2 reasons:
Cost. Their prices are increasing, in a world where hardware costs are otherwise going down, and thatās on top of already high-ish prices. DO is good but if I wanted to pay Iād at least want to get the reliability and ecosystem of AWS etc. $6-7/mo for a 1 vCPU/1GB ram VPS is too much for a ātier 2ā provider and youāll easily need to move to $12-14/mo for what I think should be base (1 vCPU/2GB ram).
Comparatively, Hetznerās base US config is $5/mo for 2 vCPU/2GB, already better than DOās upgrade. Their next level is like $9/mo for 3 vCPU/4GB ram and the differences become exponential the higher you go. The value is fantastic and there are cheaper deals if you donāt mind an EU datacenter.
IP credibility. I didnāt realize this beforehand but Iāve been running my own email server on DO for 4 years and their IP credibility is sadly not good. Worse than competitors, and Iāve had a lot of issues getting caught in spam filters and working with providers to re-whitelist my IP. This is with DMARC/etc all setup properly. Apparently their IP blocks have been used by bad actors a lot and we pay that price.
Hetzner has been really good so far and their admin panel is solid, not as easy and feature-rich as DOās but still very good. Their value and reliability has been great so far IME and Iāve moved my other federated services there.
FWIW Iām also using Backblaze B2 and would recommend them too.
Appreciate it! Iāve bookmarked this post so I can come back to it next time Iām thinking about switching.
Most of my sites see very little traffic, so Iām not worried about a lack of processing power, but I am worried about overpaying. When DO increased the price of their basic droplet a year or two ago, my reaction was that Iād already been paying for something I wasnāt getting full use out of.
Plus I occasionally see something that makes me think DO doesnāt have their act together. Like, the RSS feed for their status blog was broken for the better part of a year. They were still posting statuses, and they knew the feed was broken, it just took them that long to fix it.
On the other hand, their documentation and tutorials are great, which I definitely value. And, letās be honest, Iām settled and comfortable and it would probably take something significant to motivate me to move.
A couple of my sites (including HouseDraft which Iāve linked here before) are hosted at NearlyFreeSpeech instead. It costs about $20/year for a mostly-static site, but the company seems to be run by grumpy, opinionated old sysadmins whom I hope I never have to ask for help. Thereās a question in their FAQ that asks āIs your service easy to use?ā and the answer is āNo.ā
Yes I agree with all of this, most of mine see very little traffic as well. I have personal Pixelfed/Mastodon instances that are basically me talking to myself and even at their lowest tiers I just canāt justify the price anymore sadly. $14/mo for just the Mastodon droplet and backups (Rails needs at least 2GB of RAM to compile assets!) just isnāt sustainable. Moving was a huge pain and I stayed with DO for the same reason you said (and I think thatās totally fine), but I finally broke recently when I could cut the price to 1/3 at Hetzner.
Big +1 on DOās docs/guides too, Iāve used their guides on nginx, certbot, and many others quite a bit and theyāre very well maintained.
Iāve variously come across NearlyFreeSpeech before and for tiny static sites that seems like a great deal. I actually may even prefer the grumpy sysadmins at this phase š
Are we by default federated with all instances unless you set it up otherwise, by default not federated unless both instances agree, or something else? Do you expect this instance to be widely federated do that people can subscribe to any content they are interested in? About half of subreddits I was subscribed to were MtG related, do it is easy for me to register here, but communities on my other hobbies will most likely get created somewhere else.
PS At least for a while a community for people new to Lemmy/Fediverse to ask all the beginner questions could be useful. Unless there already is one on some federated instance.
I believe the Lemmy default is to allow federation anywhere, which is how it is here (no blocklists or allowlists).
Currently if you subscribe to non-MTG communities hosted elsewhere using your @mtgzone.com account, youād see those subscriptions on your homepage here at mtgzone.com.
Iāve been thinking about this since we set it up over the weekend and I think thatās expected behavior and the most likely to help this grow. Users should be free to use their account to follow whatever theyāre interested in, and while we host MTG-related content in our communities and will not expand the server outside of Magic content, that shouldnāt restrict users from using their account to follow what they want hosted elsewhere (and viewable in their account here).
The alternatives are:
For everyone to maintain multiple accounts (hisale@mtgzone.com for mtg content, hsiale@lemmy.ml for other stuff, etc). This seems untenable.
Not allow anyone to signup here for an account and require registration at other instances. This too seems counterintuitive and user-hostile.
Great point on beginner questions and setting up a general FAQ, Iāll try to draft something up with a bit of a angle towards people here and sticky it.
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