Testing a New Hosting Provider

My current hosting provider isn’t optimal since I moved away from PHP to code with NodeJS, so I’m testing a new hosting provider suggested to me by @phaidenbauer: Hetzner.

I love the fast interface, the affordable prices, and the company values. I choose a Cloud server based in Finland that only costs me $3 per month with plenty of bandwidth and storage space, and it should be enough to address Writelier’s current needs according to my measures.

I’m not familiar with Cloud hosting, but it’s not much different than shared or VPS hosting from what I’ve seen so far. In my case, I have root access to a Debian image to install whatever I want or customize my stack. It’s pretty life-changing. My current host isn’t adapted to NodeJS, and it should drastically improve the performance of my apps and websites.

The best part is my server will still be running on 100% renewable energy (wind and hydropower), which is something I don’t want to do without.

Thanks to root access, I’ll be able to optimize my web server to serve static content faster. I’m planning to use a cluster of NodeJS instances coupled with Nginx as a reverse proxy to load-balance the traffic, so it should also improve availability.

I don’t plan to make the switch soon though, since I’m still recovering from the migration I performed on September 10. I’ll just transfer a domain name, do some experiments and benchmark stuff.