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FediMeteo: A €4 FreeBSD VPS Became a Global Weather Service
- dashzebra 10mo agoOoh just what I needed, thanks!
- draga79 10mo agothank you!
- ajoseps 10mo agogreat write up and breakdown of the project. you can do a lot with a small VPS
- draga79 10mo agothanks!
- blain 10mo ago> German provider with 4 shared cores, 4GB of RAM, 120GB of SSD disk space, and a 1Gbit/sec internet connection Where on earth did he find €4 VPS with these specs. For example Hetzner's cheapest VPS has 2 shared vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 40 GB NVME SSD. The cheapest I found is https://contabo.com/en/vps/ https://contabo.com/en/vps/ but it still doesn't have 1 gb/s connection with that price. Edit: typo
- draga79 10mo agothis: https://www.netcup.com/de/server/vps/vps-500-g11s https://www.netcup.com/de/server/vps/vps-500-g11s
- riedel 10mo agoThis one was slightly above 4 EUR (but without any minimum contract duration) Here are actually the 4 EUR and below offers: https://www.netcup.com/de/server/guenstige-vserver-angebote https://www.netcup.com/de/server/guenstige-vserver-angebote Funnily I on first sight could not find the same page in english.
- 47282847 10mo agohttps://www.lowendbox.com/ https://www.lowendbox.com/ is a popular source.
- lbotos 10mo agoI came here to fight you but there are some low end boxes with lots of ram and disk for pretty cheap! Found this as an example: https://lowendbox.com/blog/black-friday-bytehosting-is-here-with-big-ram-vps-systems-at-cheap-prices/ https://lowendbox.com/blog/black-friday-bytehosting-is-here-...
- Imustaskforhelp 10mo agoThe bytehosting deal is good too! Oh btw lowendbox has a forum called lowendtalk where hosting providers etc. talk as well and show deals etc. and I got part of the community (you need to register and be verified manually but it wasn't hard) Lowendbox is amazing. Glad we are talking about it as I recently joined it and the community's really supportive and honestly feels more so in the sharing spirit and I even talked about why people use lowendhosts etc. and got some pretty good answers imo Although do be beware to stay away as there are some hosters which end up going completely down. So go with someone reputable as well and there is whole lore beneath in this forum :) Racknerd,dedirock are usually recommended, I recommend https://serverdeals.cc/ https://serverdeals.cc/ etc. I have a list which I can recommend after being in the community for some time and here's some websites which I recommend for suggestions https://serverdeals.cc/ https://serverdeals.cc/ https://vpspricetracker.com/ https://vpspricetracker.com/ https://getdeploying.com/ https://getdeploying.com/ Honestly I still recommend hetzner tho because these are some really really good deals but hetzner just has this reputation of more stability and I jsut have more faith in hetzner and its a "good enough" option imo and there are even some lowendhosts who kind of do share the fact that hetzner is very price competitive. I personally had gotten a 2$/month 1TB vps hosting (yeah didn't really end up using it much aside from the shock factor/running yabs on it) and also I got a 3 month 8bucks deal with netcup using their vouchers and everything to get 8 gigs of ram 4vcpus etc and honestly this was the best deal I ever saw but I will have to pay 5 bucks I guess after the 3 months end. Most of it is remaining idle tho :< Are there any services I can run for the benefit of humanity (like running some self hosted services that can help anybody out there or smth?) Let me know if you have any questions! I might be able to help you as I was active on lowendtalk till quite recently
- giancarlostoro 10mo agobuyvm used to have one (not with those specs) for like $5 a year with 256 MB I used to love buying one or two of those for simple stuff.
- Imustaskforhelp 10mo agoI am also of a similar belief but I recently found exe.dev on hackernews and I am kind of play-testing with it and the dev seems active on hackernews and on the discord so I am definitely giving it a go Gullos Hosting which has 128 Mb server for 3.5$/yearly and also for $4.49 you can still get a 256mb server from C-servers and $5.50 from byteVirt. But also, there is fact that one can probably just buy hetzner servers or upcloud servers or similar idk. I will probably try to get some free services and then transition to hetzner/upcloud/netcup when my project needs more scalability/is shown to be of valuable to the general public/interests regarding it. Honestly I got a 8 gig netcup server for 5$ and so I got it out of their limited deals section but I am thinking of just holding it and probably gonna use it extremely because with the rising prices etc., I think its good enough too as well I just love yapping about server prices and comparing them etc. I think I just love a good deal lol.
- KomoD 10mo ago> Gullos Hosting which has 128 Mb server for 3.5$/yearly and also for $4.49 you can still get a 256mb server from C-servers and $5.50 from byteVirt. I can't recommend Gullo's. I experienced near-constant network issues with my NAT VPS (in Poland, I think?), making it so unusable that I just let it idle until it expired. I should've spent the money on a 6 pack of beer instead, it is what it is.
- awesome_dude 10mo ago> now is a 4 euro per month VPS in Milano, Italy - 4 shared cores, 8 GB RAM and 75GB disk space. He didn't - he found a better specced one in Italy for that price
- draga79 10mo agoExactly. Same price but better specs. The current provider is OVH and they recently started to host VMs in Italy.
- Yeri 10mo agothere's €1 and €2 VPS too: https://www.strato.nl/server/vps-linux/ https://www.strato.nl/server/vps-linux/ (not sure what the quality is but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
- weiliddat 10mo agoIME strato is OK for cheap VPSes as long as you don’t have high expectations. 5-6 years ago, I remember trying to scale up to the 16/32GB tier was miserable and oversubscribed; moving to Hetzner at the same price point brought a huge performance boost (mostly on CPU and disk access speed).
- weiliddat 10mo agoDon’t want to ding strato exclusively, likely the case for most $1-$4/month type hosting. Not bad as long as you know what you’re getting yourself into.
- Aurornis 10mo agoBe careful when comparing core counts across providers. Those ultra cheap providers are using servers that can be many generations old. They might also be heavily oversubscribed. 4 vCPU on one of the cheap providers could be slower than 2 vCPU or even 1 vCPU on a newer generation server. You really have to test or look at benchmarks. If you have a RAM-constrained application where CPU and RAM speed are less of a priority, they can be great deals though.
- sva_ 10mo agoOracle Cloud gives you 4 oCPU (ARM), 24GB ram, 4Gb/s (10TB), 200GB NVMe SSD for free. Although some people say it is difficult to get an instance nowadays. But it worked for me and I've been using it for more than 2 years now. Some say that free tier users sometimes get booted, that's why one should upgrade to a paid account.
- joecool1029 10mo agoI have one for testing arm64 stuff on Gentoo. Worst signup I’ve ever had with a company. Once I got account I could not spin up server until converting my account to paid. They’ve never charged a fee but they won’t let you use ‘always free’ instances in busy regions until you convert to a paid account.
- LaurensBER 10mo agoThe registration process is so cumbersome and annoying that I gave up. At that moment we were in contact with Oracle for a business contract at work, the horrible sign-up process, increasing CDS (Credit Default Swap) spread and risky AI investments made me decide to cancel the POC. If your sign-up tier is so frustrating to use that you loss sales and you cannot fix it as a company, that doesn't inspire confidence in the rest of the infrastructure...
- loloquwowndueo 10mo agoIf your company is small enough that you don’t have a full procurement department to deal with all this, you’re of no interest to Oracle :)
- vjerancrnjak 10mo agoI cant even register.
- bix6 10mo agoAwesome project! I’ve always dreamed of making my own weather service so this is a great inspiration.
- draga79 10mo agoThanks!
- terespuwash 10mo agoAmazing project I understand why FediFollows helped it get more visibility https://social.growyourown.services/@FediFollows/115651419364741607 https://social.growyourown.services/@FediFollows/11565141936...
- draga79 10mo agoThank you!
- elcritch 10mo agoThis is awesome! Small projects like this that take off are fun to read. Maybe I'm imaging it but FreeBSD really seems to have far less bloat than Linux distros and better latency. I just setup a $4/mo FreeBSD VM on Vultr with 1G RAM and 1vCPU and it's only using 12% of RAM with Caddy. A VM with 4GB of RAM and 4 vCPUs could serve a lot of traffic. I'm wanting to create a personal blogging with a retro BBS-like web app with a text first interface with a multi-threaded Nim server + sqlite. I'm sure something exists already but it'd more for my own tinkering. No containers, no async, no javascript libraries. Just a small 4MB binary and FreeBSD. This posts encourages me on the FreeBSD route!
- draga79 10mo agoThank you!
- elcritch 10mo agoBTW, how do you feel about ActivityPub in general?
- draga79 10mo agoI like it. It's not perfect, but it's a good way to make sure that platforms will continue to be able to federate. They're evolving and things will improve. The experience is much better today, compared to some years ago.
- RicoElectrico 10mo agoUnbloated distros exist, Alpine is one example. I was taken aback how snappy it is. Does everything without any undue delay. Merely logging in via SSH feels quicker as you don't have to wait a second for the prompt like on Ubuntu. apk is also super fast.
- elcritch 10mo agoTrue Alpine is pretty snappy. I don't like using it as muslc has given me headaches before. Arch is faster generally too but not as much. Maybe there's something with systemd stuff.
- babo 10mo ago"I would pay close attention to accessibility: forecasts would be in local languages..." There are many situations where somebody is interesting about the local weather but not speaking the local language. Why overwrite the users preferred language from the browser?
- draga79 10mo agoIt doesn't. You can Always translate the text in your favourite language. The project aims to send the forecasts to the users, so can't be multilingual. Anyway, that's the reason why there are the emojis. Those ones are international.
- Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago4 euro servers are good. I got a similar specced server for around 5$ I guess but it has 400 gigs of storage or 500 and I think all around it might be worth it. But to be fair it was a deal for 3 months for 8$ with vouchers and everything and Its only been a month but after the 3 months, I would have to pay 5$/5Euros but I think it might be worth it, not sure but there is definitely this power of not leaving once you have started to own a vps or similar, that pull is definitely real :) OVH is good company too, one of the cheapest overall in the markets. Some people themselves resell OVH servers or white-sell it, they are chill in this manner I think one of the benefits of OVH is its unlimited egress policy. Upcloud and OVH are the only two which offer something similar I suppose and I think OVH is on the more cheaper side but Upcloud support team did feel phenomenal to me (I wish I was sponsored by them) Pro tip but I have heard from people to talk to OVH through their twitter. I don't use twitter but yeah, also another idea for support could be to join their discord too, I think one of the core people once answered my simple question there (how to run docker in ovh servers/automate it) but they didn't answer some other question regarding the tos of ovh or similar which I can admit could be not sure if we should ask a developer about such things idk but overall all of these are pretty good options to pick! There is just something fun about optimizing about server prices and support and just this grid-like optimization that takes place in your head when you are interested in things like this.
- FitchApps 10mo agoSuch a cool project. Thanks for building it. Amazing what one can do with a tiny VPS.
- xd1936 10mo agoAw man. Great write-up and implementation of an exact thing I've started to build myself, except I was build it stateless on Cloudflare Workers. Love this!
- isodev 10mo agoVery cool! And TIL about snac. It’s fascinating how tiny and practical fediverse/ActivityPub components can be. Truly brilliant design and architecture. Thanks for sharing!
- iamkonstantin 10mo agoI like the idea that you can follow cities and they appear in the timeline. Also knowing it's all just markdown - let's just say it's refreshing to have things that don't endeavour to operate on hyperscale.
- lexicality 10mo agoLovely to see someone building something that doesn't require Kubernetes over 4 AWS AZs, DynamoDB, S3, Lambda etc etc.
- tiffanyh 10mo agoIIRC, HN itself runs on modest hardware as well (just 4-cores, also FreeBSD). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28479595 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28479595
- yoonwoosik12 10mo ago[flagged]
- sammy2255 10mo agoWhy did you write your comment with ChatGPT?
- mdni007 10mo ago@grok is this true?
- nullpoint420 10mo agoThey had me until they hit me with their "It's not just poop; it's fart." writing style
- arjie 10mo agoEnjoyable read. I wish I'd paid more attention to the *BSDs when I was younger because I'm set in my Linux ways now and simply cannot find it in myself to try them. The ZFS plus jails support seems to have been the low friction way that he managed things here. I use podman, but I haven't ever tried ZFS on Linux, instead just relying on an LVM of the drives. I will remedy at least that last error soon since I want to set up a personal archiver and you can't realistically do timelines without the deduplication that ZFS gives.
- iamkonstantin 10mo ago> I wish I'd paid more attention to the *BSDs Same! I've been trying to reduce complexities in my stack (e.g. Docker) and while systemd exists, I think the concept of "jails" or sandboxes is quite neat. I love tools that come with better out-of-the-box readiness.
- DCKing 10mo agosystemd nowadays has a lot of sandboxing built in [0]! You can achieve jails using just systemd and no separate container manager. [0]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd/Sandboxing https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd/Sandboxing
- indigodaddy 10mo agoI want to do something similar, not for fediverse or anything, but an easy way to get a pretty html and/or markdown version of any current special weather statement(s) for any zip code/area/city etc.
- indigodaddy 10mo agoGot it done (well via GPT5.2/Perplexity Pro), single html file: https://jgbrwn.neocities.org/weather/ https://jgbrwn.neocities.org/weather/
- sails 10mo agoI’m doing a similar thing with open-meteo for surf forecasts (for myself primarily) Only one region, but could quite easily expand. It takes the open-meteo ocean data and combines it with some short and long range weather. Then run a preprocessed refined version of that through an LLM to turn it from quantitative into qualitative. It basically does what I would do in my head. If you have any ideas, please let me know https://surfrash.xyz/ https://surfrash.xyz/
- nrhrjrjrjtntbt 10mo agoNice. I think that site for any beach would be useful. Like how it is descriptions rather than a wall of data. Request for manly, nsw, australia otherwise :)
- sails 10mo agoNice, does require some local knowledge to get it at all useful (if you can email me some info in what conditions work I can set one up for you.) Is there a high res weather model for Aus? That makes a huge difference as well
- nrhrjrjrjtntbt 10mo agoThanks. I dont want to bother you as I assumed it would be just a case of pulling a feed but sounds like there is more. Plus I dont surf too often! I think they would have a high res weather model https://www.bom.gov.au/weather-and-climate/rain-radar-and-weather-maps https://www.bom.gov.au/weather-and-climate/rain-radar-and-we... but not sure if it is.
- sails 10mo agoCool thanks, yes all good, yes there is basically a combo of knowledge dump and assembling raw weather data to apply the knowledge to, I haven’t done another location yet, but maybe wait for a few more requests :D
- fzeindl 10mo agoI once had an idea of buying the domain "freeofcharge.org", where people could put useful services that fit into RAM onto subdomains, meaning services that cost them only ~10$ per month, which they pay out of their own pockets.