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Tell HN: Switched from Lightsail to Hetzner Cloud, 2 blogs for $4 a month
After a few comments mentioned I was probably wasting money using AWS Lightsail, I finally tried out Hetzner Cloud for hosting my Ghost Blogs.
Since ARM is new and interesting, I picked the 4$ ARM Ubuntu server for hosting. After experimenting with a few different alternatives, I installed Captain Rover again( it's still the easiest solution here).
The only thing I really had issues with was getting the A records to work right. I had some weird franken system where I had the domains on a different register, pointing to AWS name servers, pointing to Hetzner Cloud.
This was really confusing and didn't work right, so I migrated the domains over to AWS. I'm happy to say both of my blogs are working fine now.
Both of these are near no traffic blogs, so I have no idea how this would behave under load. 4$ is a great deal compared to the 30$ a month I was spending before.
Whenever I have time I can see myself using Hetzner for other projects.
Thanks HN.
- smt88 2y agoWhy are the blogs on running application servers at all? You could build them locally and host them on S3 for close to $0/month and load would be a non-issue.
- 999900000999 2y agoI like being able to write a blog post from my phone, laptop, etc. I know I can set up tooling for this with GitHub actions, but Ghost is worth 2$ per blog for me. I still have to find a way to find new free themes though.
- satvikpendem 2y agoWhy are you paying for blogs, ostensibly static content, at all? Vercel and Netlify are both basically free for both. I use Hetzner too, but only for application services, not static content.
- shinryuu 2y agoOP is running Ghost, which is an application. Of course OP could have chosen to use a static site generator but didn't in this case.
- satvikpendem 2y agoI'm curious why they chose Ghost when Markdown works just as well, and either way, I believe Ghost can still work via Vercel etc.
- 999900000999 2y agoI like Ghost. I took my monthly costs down from 30$ to 4$ HN tells me I'm still wasting money. I expect nothing less. Ghost is much easier to use than editing and commiting markdown files. I'm also able to create posts programmatically via an API. I guess this could all be done with Markdown too, but it would make things harder.
- satvikpendem 2y agoI used to use Ghost, so don't discount me as some "HN commenter." I switched to Markdown not for the cost but for the portability. It simply seemed easier to edit Markdown than to go into Ghost's editor for basically the same thing.
- 999900000999 2y agoSo I assume you edit markdown locally and then commit the files to Git which automatically builds into a static website? I'm doing certain things with the Ghost API that I don't think I can really replace with that.
- satvikpendem 2y agoYes I am. What are you doing with the Ghost API?
- 999900000999 2y agoI automate the creation of certain posts. Ultimately your not wrong, but I think Ghost is a great platform. If anything I like creating tools that I can share with others. If I want to invite friends to post on my blogs it'll take 30 seconds to provide a login and creating posts is very easy with Ghost. Getting non technical people to understand Git is a massive challenge I don't want to try again.
- ipaddr 2y agoVercel costs become too costly once you get serious traffic. Plus a server allows you to do many things while hosting static content.
- satvikpendem 2y agoFor static content? Vercel, Cloudflare etc are extremely cheap for that, even free even for large traffic loads, but yes a server allows other things than static content.
- dakiol 2y agoI tried to sign up in Hetzner but always got rejected. Also, the idea of providing my ID/Passport to them is odd. I’m running stuff on Digital Ocean without having to hand over any IDs or using my real name. So far, so good.
- _lvbh 2y agoSimilar experience. DO isn't much better. Their GitHub authentication is broken such that if you change your email on GitHub, you lose access to your DO account & must provide ID to recover it. Ended up on eth-services.de after seeing they sponsor mailcow.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- revskill 2y agoOr, just use notion and publish the writings ?
- nrnrjrjrj 2y agoDigital ocean is good enough for this. You would be trading the power/$ ratio of Hetzner for probably an easier DX with more regional options.
- BOOSTERHIDROGEN 2y agoI am using Hetzner but recently changed to Netcup due to more discounts.
- cssanchez 2y agoWhy didn't you try a barebones AWS EC2 with their Arm offers as well? Last I checked nothing beat them, especially if you reserve capacity in advance. Another option is buying a $5 Raspberry Pi Zero and hosting the ghost blog from there since the blogs don't have any traffic.
- uaas 2y ago“Nothing beat them” in what regards?
- Malidir 2y agoCool story bro :)
- inSenCite 2y agoIf they're just simple blogs why not use Github Pages? you can set it up with a custom domain and use the web codespaces