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 the blogs on running application servers at all? You could build them locally and host them on S3 for close to $0/month and load would be a non-issue.
I like being able to write a blog post from my phone, laptop, etc.
I know I can set up tooling for this with GitHub actions, but Ghost is worth 2$ per blog for me.
I still have to find a way to find new free themes though.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I like Ghost.
I took my monthly costs down from 30$ to 4$ HN tells me I'm still wasting money.
I expect nothing less.
Ghost is much easier to use than editing and commiting markdown files. I'm also able to create posts programmatically via an API.
I guess this could all be done with Markdown too, but it would make things harder.
I used to use Ghost, so don't discount me as some "HN commenter." I switched to Markdown not for the cost but for the portability. It simply seemed easier to edit Markdown than to go into Ghost's editor for basically the same thing.
So I assume you edit markdown locally and then commit the files to Git which automatically builds into a static website?
I'm doing certain things with the Ghost API that I don't think I can really replace with that.
Or, just use notion and publish the writings ?