Here my highlights of the VPS move last week. You will see a lot of cons which are negated by the fact that pricing and hardware is that much better deal.
For context, I have been a Linode customer for like 10 years. The customer service has been good, the dashboard is nice and they have many features you might want/need (object storage...).
Now, if you just need a VPS and no fancy stuff...
π Spec comparison
- RAM: 1Gb vs 4Gb
- CPUs: 1 vs 4
- SSD: 50gb vs 80Gb
- Price: 10$ vs 6.03β¬
On pricing: my bank charged me a fee for paying in foreign currency as well. So it ended up around 11β¬.
π©πͺ netcup
- Only datacenter country location is Germany. Which doesn't change much for me as I had chosen also Germany for my Linode server to begin with.
β Cons
- Provision of the server was very slow, it took 3 days to get SSH access because:
- I had to do an international bank transfer for the initial pay (Spain β‘οΈ Germany)
- netcup had to verify the transfer and proceed with the provision of server access.
- You can't pay with credit card unless you use a PayPal account (which I don't have, nor want to).
- Links from their welcome emails point to the wiki and looks in German, no easy switch to English docs (not that I really need them though).
- Lacks features (live view of the server, Object Storage...). If you need them might be a deal breaker.
- The first billing was a 6 month period, you can't really do a quick try you gotta commit to half a year.
- There are 2 dashboards (each with its own credentials) to access your account and your server.
- The dashboards could use a brush as they look old.
β Pros
- π° Half the price of Linode
- π Double the hardware specs.
- πͺπΊ Billing is in Euros rather than USD, so I don't pay any fees with my Spanish card for foreign currency.
The migration
I was way less painful than what I had anticipated. I have like a dozen domains and sites (static sites, WordPress, and Mastodon instance).
I felt very clean starting from a scratch, picking the latest LTS Ubuntu release (22.04) and installing only what I needed.
- NGINX
- I brought over snippets and site configurations with just a small change to the path of the www folder.
- MariaDB (first time I'm trying it out as a replacement of MySQL. So far no issues and it's supposed to be faster)
- Let's Encrypt
Plus your regular other services like fail2ban, logrotate and such.
Then simply moving each site with a nice rsync
rsync -avzh /var/www/MY_SITE/web MY_USER@MY_IP:/var/www/MY_SITE/html/
Code language: JavaScript (javascript)
Mastodon was certainly the trickiest one but with their official docs it took me an hour or two πͺ
Conclusion
It has been already a few days and haven't had any issues. Having 4Gb or RAM gives me spare room, the extra SSD disk space is a nice peace of mind and the 4 cores feel fast. That's taking most of my resources is of course the Mastodon instance (not unexpected).
@ricard Did you consider Oracle Cloud at all? They have a very generous free tier!
@jaytay I didn’t, no. I saw #BackBlaze recommended here over and over and had to give it try
backblaze
@ricard Did you do research beforehand? I’ve never heard about Netcup, so I did a search, and these reviews have warning flags all over them π©π©π© https://sv.hostadvice.com/hosting-company/netcup-reviews/ @shelby
Netcup Expert- & anvΓ€ndarrecensioner – 2023
@christian @shelby I did, some other #MastoAdmins had also recommended it so I gave it a go.I’ve had zero issues so far. It undoubtedly depends on what you use it for, what your needs are.
MastoAdmins
@ricard Yeah I definitely am! I set this instance up in a rush when Twitter was exploding and expected some of the @flipscreen community to migrate which didn’t happen.
@ricard Thanks Ricard. I suspect it is indeed quite simple, but as always there’s the nitty gritty details. Things like certs, specific configs you’ve changed over time, etc.Just had hoped that there was a checklist somewhere to make sure I don’t miss anything. Maybe I’ll just jump into it and write my own checklist…
@patrick Correct, I think I only copied the .env.production file and was done. Way easier than I thought.