Bruno Croci recently migrated his blog and full stack from an Ubuntu 16.04 LTS server running on a Digital Ocean VPS in New York City to a FreeBSD virtual machine hosted by Hetzner in Germany [1, 2].
Croci's blog had been running on Ubuntu 16.04 for over 10 years on the Digital Ocean droplet. However, Ubuntu 16.04 had not been supported for at least five years, exposing the system to security risks due to lack of updates [1, 2].
The previous VPS cost $13 per month and included 2GB of RAM, 1 virtual CPU, 50GB of disk space, and a 2TB monthly traffic quota [1]. In contrast, Croci’s new Hetzner VPS is priced under 6 euros per month—less than half the cost of the old server—and offers double the RAM and CPU capacity. While the disk space on the Hetzner server is slightly smaller, the traffic quota is 10 times larger than the previous setup [1]. The cheapest Hetzner VPS costs about 3.56 euros monthly, but Croci opted for a more powerful plan [1].
Croci chose FreeBSD primarily because of its advanced features like Jails and the ZFS filesystem, which he finds superior to Linux alternatives. He told sources that he "absolutely adores the recent surge in people (re)discovering the BSDs as a valid alternative to Linux in both the server and desktop space" [2].
Croci’s move marks a significant upgrade in hardware and a switch to a more modern, secure operating system after over a decade on an outdated Ubuntu version. The migration also shows cost savings while gaining performance.
The migration was completed recently and the blog now runs on the Hetzner FreeBSD VPS in Germany [1, 2].
