It's time. Time for retirement. Retirement for my dedicated server, hosted by HostEurope. This is not the first time - already about a decade ago I had to move away from my - back then - Windows 2008 server. It was not supported any more and HostEurope did not have any capacity of letting the old hardware continue to run.
So here we are. What was back then a great upgrade is now totally obsolete again. With Microsoft having ended support for Windows Server 2012 R2 it's also time for me to look for something new.
Every option at HostEurope would have been either worse or more expensive. I already pay a lot more than I used to pay when I started using dedicated hosting. Why go even higher? For years I am thinking already about moving all this stuff to the cloud, but I did not. Until now!
But how to stay below 30 € per month for a website with low response times, database access, at least a TB of storage + bandwidth, and multiple other things - most notably email? Especially email is a deal breaker for most clouds.
Luckily, I found a great solution. I went to Fastmail. This is a great service that does not only give you a wonderful (and secure) email experience, but also a DNS service, static storage, and more. With Fastmail in the center I can also use free services from Azure or other providers such as Render. Surely, a few costs will accumulate and I will have to change / migrate some of the code; but that was anyway the plan.
The idea is to migrate over until the end of the year and then to use this new basis for actually bringing the blog (and all other parts) from a 2010-ish feeling to a 2025-ish feeling.
Ready for the ride?!