Result of my migration from dedicated server to VPS
At the end of the last year, I’ve decided that my dedicated server was too much overkill regarding my needs. So I’ve migrated my self hosted tools to a VPS and some Cloud storage. I’ve finished the job on past January.
Hey, that’s the first time I use this shortcode !
This migrated was motivated by two main goals :
- Reduce the time consuming maintenance tasks (hypervisor, VMs, backups, etc)
- Reduce my hosting costs
From where I started
In the beginning of times, between the dinosaurs and the Egyptian civilisation who told some random aliens how to space travel and build pyramids, I was renting a server hosted by OVHCloud. The offer was pretty nice back at this time because I’ve subscribed it during a Black Friday operation with the nice discount : 35€/month instead of 50.
Back on this time, I was also hosting my mail server but I moved my mailbox to Infomaniak Mail because it’s really difficult to maintain.
However, in 2020, this server has been one of the casualties during the Strasbourg data center fire. The server was replaced and as a compensation OVHCloud offered me six months free of charge. However, the new server was at the regular price, so my hosting costs increased up to 60€/month when the free period was over.
Then, I had to reinstall everything and ensure the components were always working and up to date, which is still a workload.
This is when I’ve started to think about if the effort worth it or not. The first move was finally made when I’ve subscribed to the Infomaniak kDrive service to replace my NextCloud around 2021 Q4.
Then, I’ve finally subscribed to a VPS offer, still at OVHCloud, for this blog and my former TT-RSS instance (and some other minor things). The blog was moved to an Object Storage container served by the reverse proxy hosted on the VPS in past november.
The physical server became more and more useless and I could finally stop the subscription in January 2022.
And now, the result
| Service | Monthly Cost |
|---|---|
| Infomaniak Mail | 1.80€ |
| Infomaniak kDrive | 5.99€ |
| VPS subscription | 19.14€ |
| Object Storage | 2.83€ |
| Total | 29.78€ |
Reminder : the original cost was : 59.99€/month. All prices are VAT included (20% in France).
Basically, I’ve divided by two my hosting costs making them above the previous server price, removed a workload as I now use some SaaS services for my mails and online storage sync. The VPS is a little expensive because I’ve added a supplementary storage (+10€). To optimize its cost, I’ve choose to subscribe for two years so I have a 40% discount on it.
The Object Storage will decrease for the next month because I had some old Nextcloud backups on a container. I’ve dropped it this week, so the cost should be reduced to … around 0.10€/month because of the bandwidth usage of this blog and the photo blog (reduced thanks to the reverse proxy cache). Every containers are below 1GB so they cost nothing (OVHCloud charges from the first GB, I had 250 on the former backup storage).
And above all of this, I don’t have to maintain a lot of things compared to my previous hosting. The VPS is maintained by OVHCloud. I’ve automated the system updates so I just have to check time to time. I’ve replaced TT-RSS with FreshRSS and both are installed as a container, so the maintaining requirement is low. The most critical services (mails and files storage) are now hosted by a pro.
So, I think I’ve made some nice savings for both money and time. You may have noticed I haven’t listed the domain name cost. As it’s a fixed expense that is not related to the hosting, I’ve omitted it on purpose. The domain cost 14.40€/year if you ask.