Beauty of running your own servers

It’s hard to ignore the word ‘cloud’ these days. If you are in fields related to the IT industry, the chances are you keep hearing about it more regularly over the past few years. Companies are trying hard to move your software to the cloud to earn more money and promising to make your life convenient. Product Managers and people in C-level positions are making a move towards serverless. There are a few who don’t want to manage their hardware.

I was certainly in that bandwagon. In fact, at some point, I convinced my fellow team members to investigate cloud solutions and make a move sooner. And we were hosting most of our servers on AWS and serverless systems. Though it was not that hard to move, I realized we were technically locked in to that specific vendor. The best part - we did change certain components of our web application to use services provided by AWS like DynamoDB. Over a period of time, even the cost of cloud bills were justifiable to an extent, and it even felt that was going to be the norm. The whole perspective of this got changed when I started my side projects. The cost of serverless platforms and third-party services looks reasonable for a company that makes a regular income. Projects which are started for fun and make no money cannot bear the cost. This really was the eye-opening moment.

During the Global Financial Crisis, around 2008, servers were expensive and managing a shared space on a VPS was common among developers who were hosting their websites and running their applications. It’s not because of the GFC that they were expensive. I started my career around that time. I was one among them. It was an era where every single byte in memory and hard disks needed to be accounted for. Hetzner was the company providing VPS for cheap. One could hire entire metal for hosting their application for a fraction of the cost. I was using their servers for hosting my PHP application back then. I hired one for my personal stuff in 2015. Linode was one of my favorites before they were bought.

I am back again to experience the same. The servers that I am using on Hetzner are outdated and not sold anymore. They never missed a beat. I keep updating the server with a rock-solid Debian. I used to run nginx for my web servers. Caddy makes my life easier without having to worry about certificates for my websites. This website is hosted on a tiny Linux machine on Hetzner running Debian 12. I used to host the website on Cloudflare. It’s time to feel nostalgic again.

Hearing the sound of the clock ticking, the smell of the petrol engine, the feel of tuning the radio, and managing and maintaining your own server. They never disappoint me.