Hetzner is one of the go-to server providers for Fediverse instances, in part due to its cheap offerings while still providing high quality service. However, Hetzner has announced a price adjustment, which has increased the prices of some servers as much as 3-4 times the original. This kind of ruins the point in using Hetzner, as the main appeal was Hetzner’s cheap server prices.
Some of their servers haven’t increased an insane amount, for example, the CAX41 offering has gone from €31.49 monthly to €40.99 (30% increase). Others are much higher though; CPX41 has gone from €38.99 monthly to €120.49 (209% increase)!
To any Fediverse admins using Hetzner, how would you see this affecting your instance? Will you be migrating to a different service or sticking with Hetzner even with the price hike?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe existing servers will be grandfathered in to the old price point, so that will certainly buy some time to find a potential alternative.
I personally am using Hetzner for my Mbin instance, but the price increase doesn’t seem completely unreasonable for the specific server I am currently using. I do not see myself needing to rescale the server any time soon, so I should be able to keep the old price anyway.
Hacker news discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48540844
Hetzner price adjustment table: https://docs.hetzner.com/general/infrastructure-and-availability/price-adjustment/
I’m so happy that I went for local hosting at home since 2008. I started with game servers.
Eventually hosting everything from git server to file storage. From todo list to my homepage. From my blog to voip server. From plantuml server to mbin. From Mastodon to my own search engine. From dashboarding to block chain explorer.
what are game servers?
Back in the days you were able to host your own game server like Cod or bf2 and many many other fps games. Like soldier of fortune and more. Allowing you to be the host, but rather than also being a player a game server is a headless server that hosts a game, so people can join the server (24/7). Often by using the public IP address.
The mear fact I need to explain what this is makes me really sad. Nothing personal to you but in general sad. Since those game servers hosted by dedicated people across the world make gaming so much more fun. More caring and more decentralized. This also means that the multiplayer gameplay can’t never die.
Today I guess there is no server executable being shared. Everything is fully in the hands of the game studio/publisher. Hence running a game server makes it possible to keep multiplayer working. This is also exactly the case. There area still Cod4, counter strike, bf2, crysis, halo 1, sof double helix and may of those old games alive. No stupid single point of control.
oh that makes sense. thanks.
How are you combatting the web crawlers / AI shitfest?
My small repos were getting smashed for a while. Was using cloudflare tunnels, have had to put up some barriers via cloudflare to curb the traffic. Probably will investigate some wifu defence but it’s just another thing to do.
Last 30 days images below.
My git isnt anything special, just mirrored from my Codeburg.
I block huge data-center cidr ranges. Whole cidr yes. Not a single ip. But tens of thousands, most like more in the millions of IPs by now.
Then I also have rate limits installed. So it block users when a threshold is reached in Angie/Nginx via fail2ban.
Finally, depending on your software. I know that Forgejo and gitea can block access or limit access for non-registered/logged-out users. So visitors can only view the repos and some files. But maybe not scrape all the git commit hashes etc.
The latter I would call server hardening.
But it first starts with decent logging and displaying the data. Easy to drill down or filter. This is needed to identify the source /sources of the bad actors.
These are the basics. Even before I consider cloudflare or Anubis.
Interesting on forgejo I’ll investigate as that’s the container I use.
Cloudflare was easy enough as I already use cloudflare tunnels to expose some internet facing services I run. But reducing the reliance on providers is something that I want to achieve.
Anubis still does a pretty good job
Yeah was thinking that will be the next step.
Any good guides for self-hosting git?
You’re most likely not looking to selfhost plain git but more something like GitHub (Web frontend, administrative tools etc.). I use Forgejo (installation guide) for that and am quiet happy with it. Its more lightweight then e.g. GitLab.
Yes so I use gitlab here. And I use the free version (community edition). I installed it directly on my VM. So I have proxmox. And within proxmox I have an Ubuntu server vm. Within this vm I installed the whole gitlab suite. Including my own gitlab runners. Love it.
See https://docs.gitlab.com/install/package/ubuntu/
Alternatives that I also donate to is Forgejo.