Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD

This blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD

This blog has been running on a Digital Ocean VPS for over ten years. A machine hosted in New York City, running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. An LTS that hasn’t been in support for at least 5 years. It was about time to change it. After some considerations, I migrated to a Hetzner virtual machine that is way better than my old Ubuntu one, less than half the price of what I used to pay, and just across the country from me. Not only that, but I took the challenge to move my stack to FreeBSD. It’s a long text, but stay for a cool introduction of FreeBSD Jails with Bastille and some interesting site load benchmarks.

Motivation

If you know how releases on Ubuntu work (I’m not very familiar myself), once the release is out of support, the apt package repository is out, so you can’t get any updates from it anymore. There are several implications of running such an outdated system, and the most obvious is that your server is just not as secure anymore. There might be several bots out there just trying to find nodes with vulnerabilities to introduce malicious stuff onto them. Luckily (I think), nothing ever happened. Not that there was anything important to be stolen in there either way. But I remember a long time ago, one WordPress blog that I had, which was also running on an old VPS, randomly got a lot of very suspicious links to casino and gambling spread across the text in the posts.

I was already using a Hetzner VPS as a remote development machine, where I SSH into from anywhere, and it’s been a reliable good VPS for the price. So I decided to start by comparing the specs. This was the droplet running my blog and my other websites:

My old Digital Ocean server

That has 2GB of RAM, one vCPU, 50GB disk, 2TB of monthly traffic and runs Ubuntu 16.04 x64. It’s located in their datacenter in New York City. That’s probably why it’s so expensive, I was paying $13 monthly for that.

Hetzner is an established European IT company and has big data-centers in Germany, where I live. The cheapest Hetzner server I could get, at only 3.56 euros is already way better than my old one:

A cup of coffee per month

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