Tell HN: Switched from Lightsail to Hetzner Cloud, 2 blogs for $4 a month

After a few comments mentioned I was probably wasting money using AWS Lightsail, I finally tried out Hetzner Cloud for hosting my Ghost Blogs.

Since ARM is new and interesting, I picked the 4$ ARM Ubuntu server for hosting. After experimenting with a few different alternatives, I installed Captain Rover again( it's still the easiest solution here).

The only thing I really had issues with was getting the A records to work right. I had some weird franken system where I had the domains on a different register, pointing to AWS name servers, pointing to Hetzner Cloud.

This was really confusing and didn't work right, so I migrated the domains over to AWS. I'm happy to say both of my blogs are working fine now.

Both of these are near no traffic blogs, so I have no idea how this would behave under load. 4$ is a great deal compared to the 30$ a month I was spending before.

Whenever I have time I can see myself using Hetzner for other projects. Thanks HN.

Why are you paying for blogs, ostensibly static content, at all? Vercel and Netlify are both basically free for both. I use Hetzner too, but only for application services, not static content.

shinryuu · a year ago

OP is running Ghost, which is an application. Of course OP could have chosen to use a static site generator but didn't in this case.

satvikpendem · a year ago

I'm curious why they chose Ghost when Markdown works just as well, and either way, I believe Ghost can still work via Vercel etc.

ipaddr · a year ago

Vercel costs become too costly once you get serious traffic. Plus a server allows you to do many things while hosting static content.

satvikpendem · 10 months ago

For static content? Vercel, Cloudflare etc are extremely cheap for that, even free even for large traffic loads, but yes a server allows other things than static content.

smt88 · a year ago

Why are the blogs on running application servers at all? You could build them locally and host them on S3 for close to $0/month and load would be a non-issue.

999900000999 · a year ago

I like being able to write a blog post from my phone, laptop, etc.

I know I can set up tooling for this with GitHub actions, but Ghost is worth 2$ per blog for me.

I still have to find a way to find new free themes though.

cssanchez · 10 months ago

Why didn't you try a barebones AWS EC2 with their Arm offers as well? Last I checked nothing beat them, especially if you reserve capacity in advance.

Another option is buying a $5 Raspberry Pi Zero and hosting the ghost blog from there since the blogs don't have any traffic.

uaas · 10 months ago

“Nothing beat them” in what regards?

dakiol · a year ago

I tried to sign up in Hetzner but always got rejected. Also, the idea of providing my ID/Passport to them is odd. I’m running stuff on Digital Ocean without having to hand over any IDs or using my real name. So far, so good.

acheong08 · 10 months ago

Similar experience. DO isn't much better. Their GitHub authentication is broken such that if you change your email on GitHub, you lose access to your DO account & must provide ID to recover it.

Ended up on eth-services.de after seeing they sponsor mailcow.

inSenCite · 10 months ago

If they're just simple blogs why not use Github Pages? you can set it up with a custom domain and use the web codespaces

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nrnrjrjrj · a year ago

Digital ocean is good enough for this. You would be trading the power/$ ratio of Hetzner for probably an easier DX with more regional options.

BOOSTERHIDROGEN · a year ago

I am using Hetzner but recently changed to Netcup due to more discounts.