Good-bye VPS

This blog has been created in 2019, with its first post in French published in the end of December. Powered by Plume, a federated blogging tool (that seems to not be active anymore), it was hosted on a dedicated server I was renting at OVHCloud’s low-cost brand, So You Start. Back on this time, this server was a good deal, subscribed during the Black Friday, it was one of the rare actual commercial opportunities for this period in France our retailer copied from the USA. This dedicated server was running Proxmox and several VMs were made for specific needs.

In January 2021, I’ve decided to change my Blog tool and use Hugo (in French). Back on this time, the setup was quite geeky, powered by a CI tool chain hosted on my dedicated server based on Gitea and Jenkins, publishing the web pages after a commit.

And March 2021 happened for OVHCloud, with their data center incident in Strasbourg, my server got destroyed. A couple of days later, I’ve rented a new similar one still at OVHCloud for which I’ve had a commercial reduction to compensate the loss of the previous one. I took my time to rent it since this server was just for personal use. They were flooded by more important requests, I could wait.

At the end of the year, I’ve grown fed up to maintain the Proxmox server and the VMs despite several automations. And I wasn’t really using this server at its full potential, so I’ve decided to stop it. I’ve decided to switch to a VPS (still at OVHCloud) in order to reduce my maintenances time cost. The blog’s content was hosted on an object storage, the VPS was mostly a reverse proxy for it. A couple of months later, my Photo Blog was pushed online using the same method.

Recently, I’ve put my choices in questions again. One of the trigger was Red Hat’s last Trafalgar¹ regarding the RHEL sources access restrictions only for the subscribers put some panic to their rebuilds. And I was using Rocky Linux (and I was very happy with it). With that, I was thinking I didn’t want to change again my OS, rebuild everything again, adapt it in case I would switch to a Debian-based for example, etc.

So recently, I’ve decided to move everything to a more conventional web hosting, which is currently Infomaniak. Why them ? Because I know them since around 15 years. They’ve hosted, and still do, my first website (mmhh actually the first I’ve kept), dedicated to the Gundam franchise which is now a legacy content that I’ve kept online because I didn’t want to lose 15 years on work on it. But back on this time, Infomaniak’s web hosting was expensive compared to a VPS on which I’ve had more freedom to do whatever I wanted on it. For instance, if this blog and the photo blog were just served by a reverse proxy, I still had my FreshRSS instance running from a container.

But since a couple of times, Infomaniak changed their offers and it got more interesting. The Web hosting now costs 80€/year instead of 120 at the beginning and allows up to 20 sites whereas before you were paying for each of them. It’s almost the same cost as my VPS, but I don’t have to manage anything now.

FreshRSS could be installed very easily on it, nothing special to do. My blog is uploaded using rsync on the directory instead of rclone with the Object Storage API. And I’ve recently moved on it my stupid Daily Fortune said by a Cow website which is published by GitHub Actions every days.

So, when I take some look back, I would said I’ve basically done a move-to-cloud migration :

• At the very beginning, my Nextcloud, RSS Reader, and other things, were hosted on my NAS at home (on-premises)
• Then, it moved to a bare metal server (could be considered as private cloud)
• Then, it moved to a VPS, a IaaS component
• Now, it’s on a web hosting that could be considered as a PaaS platform, since the runtime and the sub layers are fully managed by the provider. I just need to select the runtime versions and some settings.

We will see what would be the next move in this little website’s life.

One last thing I want to say : I’m not done with OVHCloud. They’re still a nice provider and I’ve evaluated their Web-hosting solution also. But it was too expensive. I’m keeping them for more conventional Cloud usage such as temporary pay as you go test machines and punctual usages like having a VM with a personal VPN when I need to use a non-trusted network connection.