Where To Go From Here

An overview of why I feel stunlocked when it comes to my current technology choices.

Hosting

Is

At the moment this blog is hosted on Cloudflare. Cloudflare is problematic^[1]:

• Cloudflare bankrolls fascists
• Thoughts on Cloudflare^[2]
• Cloudflare considered harmful

Ought

• Either: An affordable cloud provider with less problematic politics/history
• Or: A JamStack provider
• Or: Self hosting using a VPS/shared hoster/etc.

Reasons Is != Ought

Cloud Provider

• None of the hyperscalers are any better ethically or cheaper or easier to use
• I looked at a lot of European-based cloud providers^[3] and most of them were either pretty expensive or were not set up to handle static sites with some dynamic stuff on top (Jamstack approach)
• In any case: The move from Cloudflare to another Cloud Provider is not 1:1
  • I find this rather surprising because my blog merely consists of
    • one "worker" (for the API, powering the Guestbook and couple of other things)
    • a "pages" project (for the static site)
    • a KV store (f.x. for favs)
    • an object store (for images, etc.)
    • a database
  • you'd think that these building blocks would be available, but it seems most cloud providers either don't have all the pieces or are prohibitively expensive^[4]

So, all things considered using any other Cloud provider, is either only half the solution (and f.x. a VPS and S3 object storage would still be needed) or it's too expensive.

JamStack Provider

• Main player here is Netlify, which is US-based
  • Since I have already some dynamic features and plan to build more, their pricing means that I would run up against the limit of even their $9 plan relatively soon-ish (calculator here)
  • It seems to have everything I'd want, except s3-compatible storage (their blobs product doesn't seem to offer any, which is a requirement, because my current image workflow depends on it.
• One interesting option is statichost, but a vps/object storage is required to make it work
  • and at that point I can just host everything on a vps
• Vercel is trump shit
• Render uses Cloudflare

Self-Hosting

Most-likely I'd want to host myself going forward. A simple docker-compose file and a few containers would make sure things run and I might even use something like Coolify to do so.

• Hetzner
  • I kind of want to avoid using US-based hosters (again, see Shift To Europe), so Hetzner initially seemed like a good choice
  • Hetzner is Germany-based (good) and it's not as much of an open-and-shut case as with Cloudflare, but you can find some information giving me weird vibes around the topics Ukraine and Russia and treatment of customers in general^[5]
    • Wikipedia
    • New Ukrainialn Users can't register?
    • An example reddit thread (Hetzner has answered in the comments)
  • technically, there is a lot right about a Hetzner, they even have object storage (even if it's not that cheap), but the vibes are off
• Contabo
  • Contabo seemed like a good alternative until you notice how much pricing bullshit they are doing (24 months commitment, but presented as monthly prices, etc.)
• Shared hosters
  • NearlyFreeSpeech
    • I love their pricing model
    • US-based
    • no docker
  • Uberspace
    • Germany-based
    • [some kind of docker... maybe?](https://github.com/katakombi/udocker-uberspace
    • I hate their pricing model
• Too many others to mention
  • either no Object Storage or weird pricing, or not EU based, or, or, or

Git

Is

At the moment all my projects live on Github. Github is Microsoft and Microsoft is not exactly EU-based. Github has also become a symbol for "AI" hate.^[6]

I am not as much motivated to leave Github behind, but I kind of am motivated to see what else is out there and use less Big-Tech stuff.

Ought

• Either: Another service that offers private repos, ci
• Or: Self-hosted Git

Reasons Is != Ought

Other hosters

• Codeberg
  • very cool project
  • you don't really get private repos, though
  • I think they are somewhat unclear on how to handle LLMs, example topic
• sourcehut
  • initially I thought: "that's it"
  • but I think that this AI rant from one of the maintainers is way over the top
• tangled and radicle
  • two cool decentralized projects
  • haven't spent enough time with them though and they seem to just be starting out
• codefloe
  • runs forgejo
  • has ci
  • I hate their pricing model (donations based with a "free tier")^[7]
• Others
  • there are some other forgejo hosters, but all of them had something that I didn't like or something that was missing

Self-Host

• forgejo
  • made by the people behind Codeberg
  • probably the only real viable alternative right now if I want to self-host my code
• gitlab and gitea are disqualified for one reason or another (like too much complexity to self-host comfortably, weird for profit companies taking over domains and trademarks)

Hardware

Is

I am 100% on Apple devices nowadays. With that comes a certain vendor lock-in, as you might imagine. I am not super happy with recent "bending of knees" moves made by the company towards a US-government that can only be described as corrupt.

Ought

• Find replacements for all hardware and services from Apple

Reasons Is != Ought

• The mobile landscape looks absolutely atrocious
  • as long as the only viable alternative is Android, I'll stay on iOS thank you very much
• a Linux laptop is certainly possible; I had one at work (and have had Linux machines as my daily driver), but I am not in the market for a new hobby
  • this might change if Apple becomes openly racist for example, at the moment (it seems) they are just playing along - which is bad enough (if not surprising)

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