This is a brief, but long owed post.

Last year, I decided that the best path to claim ownership of my data was self-hosting Nextcloud.1 I faced some issues using Hetzner’s 1 vCPU plan and I convinced myself that the culprit was their vCPU not being powerful enough.2

If it’s true that their vCPU wasn’t as powerful as Vultr’s one. It’s also true that with the right know-how I would be able to debug the issue and make things work. The culprit was in fact my lack of knowledge.

So, what changed? I just learned how to tune PHP3 and PostgreSQL4 according to the server resources. That’s it!

That settled, I end up moving to Hetzner at the beginning of this year. Currently, on a 1 vCPU VPS (that costs €2.49/month), I’m hosting Nextcloud, Drone CI, Miniflux, MailyGo and this blog without issues. In the future, if I see myself in need of more CPU power, I can easy rescale the VPS to an optimized for CPU plan (based on AMD EPYC 2nd Gen processors) with 2 vCPU for €3.49/month. Which is still cheaper than the Vultr’s 1 vCPU plan.

If you’re looking for a VPS in Europe, give Hetzner a try. They have datacenters in Germany (Nuremberg and Falkenstein) and Finland (Helsinki). You can use my referral link to get €20 in credits. For full disclosure, if you choose to stick with them and after you spend €10, I receive €10 in credits.5