Moving to new places
I've recently decided to migrate all of my stuff to a new provider.
So let me preface this by saying that my previous hoster, Avoro, is a really great host with very fast and nice support staff. However there is always competition and it was only a matter of time before something worth of interest popped up. Now this doesn't necessarily mean that I was unhappy with my service, I just simply found something better. At this point you probably guessed that I was about to mention Hetzner, a hosting company which is also heavily recommended online, and after making an account and exploring around for a bit I was pretty shocked to find that for the same money that I am currently paying for my former server, I could get the same specs with an extra 40GBs of space. Did I actually switch because of 40GBs? No it's a bit more complex than that. At first I thought that for the same money an extra 40GBs would be awesome, especially for my file server and matrix server, as those services take up a considerable amount of space over time, which can be managed, but still, 40 Gigs is 40 Gigs.
The thing that made the final push was ease of use, hands down. I went to their server ordering page to configure a server with the same specs as the one I currently have at Avoro and I was pleasantly surprised to find a load of config options like being able to configure the firewall, which my server goes through (not something like ufw, which is on the server), setting up ssh pubkey auth automatically and if I needed more space, renting seperate volumes which then can be mounted on my instance. On top of that they also have a beautiful website with far more precise monitoring and overall information than what I have at Avoro. Additionally, when I finally get some stable income, I can expand my server and it's resources as I see fit. Sure, Avoro gives you the option to expand, but it's very limited to specific configurations and expensive the more you deviate from said configurations. On Hetzner I can literally just decide one day that I want a server with 64GB of ram, a ton of cores and 4 2TB volumes and it's no problem. Not to mention that for a tiny fee they automatically backup my server, which is far better than Avoro charging on a per-backup basis. These backups of course are not even tied to my server, so I could just buy a much bigger server like a dedicated one and load one of my backups onto it. In conclusion, to explain my decision, three things: Ease of use – Good price – Future proof.
After buying my server at Hetzner I got pretty excited to set it up, but of course I do stuff like this at midnight, so I had to go to sleep, which was a bit difficult with the urge to get up and hop on my PC. Well, morning rolled in and my first waking thought was to get to school as fast as possible so I could start working on moving stuff from my old server to the new one, lucky me I saved the ssh key for the root account on my phone so I actually could login. Installing nginx and copying over the website was a breeze and I got it done in like 5 minutes. I also updated my DNS settings to point to the new server so I could setup TLS and imported my old nginx config which I had to retweak a little. I did a fresh install of my file server which was a bit annoying, because installing node is a pain. After giving up on using apt or pip, I added Volta, which beautifully setup everything and yarn would finally start without any errors. The last task was to install matrix, and oh boy was it a pain. Nothing worked and no matter what way I installed it, it just didn't want to properly start or reload, or anything really. This was partly my fault, because I desperately wanted to have delegation on my new homeserver. Delegation basically means that any event or connection is routed through cennepal.net, but the actual matrix install is at matrix.cennepal.net. This turns my name from “@german:matrix.cennepal.net” to “@german:cennepal.net”. Looks much prettier, but makes for a nice little headache when configuring nginx. Anyway I did persevere and matrix runs like butter now, so that's that. I had also moved my two private discord bots over which means that my old server is now empty.
Overall, I am pretty pleased with how fast I managed to get everything back online and to think this all started by being insulted on matrix. Anyway, it feels good to finally write about something again, although I expect it's gonna be a little while before I do so again.