I switched from Hetzner to Netcup last year and took the yearly deal just before they increased prices as well, so I'm safe until 2026-12-09. After that, I'll have to figure out what to switch to, if anything at all.
this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2026
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i moved my mbin instance from one of the more expensive options, amazon, to hetzner coming up on almost a year ago now.
they have some used, dedicated servers that you can get diirt cheap. when they raised all the prices mine went up maybe 3%. and thats after more than halving my monthly cost by moving there in the first place. no big deal.
its clearly their cloudy hardware (scaling) used for ai nonsense that they are pushing rates up on, for those obvious reasons. they dont give a shit who pays and theres lots of stupidly deep ai pockets at the moment
I'm so happy that I went for local hosting at home since 2008. I started with game servers.
Eventually hosting everything from git server to file storage. From todo list to my homepage. From my blog to voip server. From plantuml server to mbin. From Mastodon to my own search engine. From dashboarding to block chain explorer.
what are game servers?
How are you combatting the web crawlers / AI shitfest?
My small repos were getting smashed for a while. Was using cloudflare tunnels, have had to put up some barriers via cloudflare to curb the traffic. Probably will investigate some wifu defence but it's just another thing to do.
Last 30 days images below.
My git isnt anything special, just mirrored from my Codeburg.
I block huge data-center cidr ranges. Whole cidr yes. Not a single ip. But tens of thousands, most like more in the millions of IPs by now.
Then I also have rate limits installed. So it block users when a threshold is reached in Angie/Nginx via fail2ban.
Finally, depending on your software. I know that Forgejo and gitea can block access or limit access for non-registered/logged-out users. So visitors can only view the repos and some files. But maybe not scrape all the git commit hashes etc.
The latter I would call server hardening.
But it first starts with decent logging and displaying the data. Easy to drill down or filter. This is needed to identify the source /sources of the bad actors.
These are the basics. Even before I consider cloudflare or Anubis.
Interesting on forgejo I'll investigate as that's the container I use.
Cloudflare was easy enough as I already use cloudflare tunnels to expose some internet facing services I run. But reducing the reliance on providers is something that I want to achieve.
Anubis still does a pretty good job
Yeah was thinking that will be the next step.
Any good guides for self-hosting git?
Yes so I use gitlab here. And I use the free version (community edition). I installed it directly on my VM. So I have proxmox. And within proxmox I have an Ubuntu server vm. Within this vm I installed the whole gitlab suite. Including my own gitlab runners. Love it.
See https://docs.gitlab.com/install/package/ubuntu/
Alternatives that I also donate to is Forgejo.
You're most likely not looking to selfhost plain git but more something like GitHub (Web frontend, administrative tools etc.). I use Forgejo (installation guide) for that and am quiet happy with it. Its more lightweight then e.g. GitLab.
I left Hetzner after the price increase a couple of months ago, expecting that hike not to be the last.
Now I run my own hardware. It feels good to 'own the means of federation' and not rent it!
I think it would be nice to be able to completely self-host (on my own hardware), but I've always wondered what you are supposed to do about power/internet outages? It's not frequent at all, but there will be a few days out of the year where power is completely out (due to a storm for instance). Similarly, internet gets a bit spotty after a heavy storm. Maybe I shouldn't be worrying about 100% uptime too much though, as I am offering a free service. Still, if I can help it, I'd prefer people not to have a 5-day period when they can't access the server at all.
Yeah it's not great. I could have a PSU blow out any time and it'll take me days to sort it out, probably. I have a spare server (these things are < $100 so why not) but getting it ready for prime time wouldn't be quick either.
Anyway the resiliency of the fediverse is in the network - people can just use another instance for their fix of shitposts until their main comes back.
Hmmm. There is probably room for a client-based smooth switch-over here. That sort of thing would really make Lemmy more noob-friendly.
I've been selfhosting at home for quite a while. And we had power outages, construction work cut the internet cable, I messed up the computer... And the annoyance level just varies a lot depending on the specific service. I'm completely fine without mail for a few hours, Peertube and the Fediverse being unreachable. There will also be error notifications on my phone because Nextcloud can't sync the calendar etc any more. But all that stuff will recover and I'll manage to find something else to do. What I found more annoying is my instant messenger go down, because I use it to communicate more time-critical stuff with my family. Also annoying to hardcode the DNS server onto every device, they're now all offline and I need to google the phone number of the power company. Though changing the DNS settings back isn't too hard. And my Home Assistant sometimes does weird stuff so I'm gonna need to check on all the devices. And the Ikea lightbulbs will turn on anyway the moment power has been restored.
Wrt dns there are better ways. Like auto updating a dns record that regulary checks what your public ip is. And then automatically update it. Services like ddns.
I myself also host everything at home. But since 3 years now I went to an official business internet subscription, which allows me to have a static ipv4 and ipv6 ip address from my isp.
I have a business internet connection as well. I'm going to cancel it though, eventually. It's a bit pricey. And they don't do IPv6 for longterm customers, I just got my static IPv4 and that's it.
Yeah, what I meant with DNS: I run a DNS Adblocker. And the big German ISPs do some silly DNS censoring, mostly for movie piracy websites. So I run my own DNS server. I had that configured on all my devices. Which is kind if great, I'll get a good amount of ads and trackers blocked without any additional effort. But it's a huge single point of failure. So now I have some services like DNS run on a VPS.
Power going out depends a lot on where you live. I can't remember the last time I lost power at home (in NL), probably a decade ago? And it only lasted 30 minutes I think. Depending on how common it is and how long it tends to last it could be worth it to invest in a UPS or even a generator.
Internet going out is more common over here, which is easily mitigated with multiple uplinks and some kind of dynamic DNS if you feel that's worth it.
I run servers since 2007 in the Netherlands. Back in the days we had way more outages then today.
Today it was mainly planned outages of people working on the infrastructure. I still need to buy a UPS. But even without it it's fine here (Tiel, Gelderland).
I'm hosting mbin and tons of other services and websites at home.
(hoi)
Honest it's fine here. Even without ups. But you can buy a ups to avoid short term downages.
Yup I run my own server since 2008 actually. I first ran game servers. Later I started hosting other services and websites. And eventually basically everything you can think of. Storage (nextcloud), git server (gitlab with cicd), to do list, my own websites / blog /.... Mbin, matrix server (element), voip (mumble), block chain explore (bch explorer). So basically everything...
How do you handle security of your home server? (like open ports etc)
That's a secret. But the selfhost community has lots of advice, e.g. https://piefed.social/c/selfhosted@lemmy.world/p/2146191/safely-exposing-services-to-the-internet
There was a big price increase a month or two ago that affected existing servers. I think this is recognizing that Hetzner just can’t acquire new servers (particularly memory) at anywhere close to what they could before. RAM prices are up about 400% in the past year and rising, and I think even server chassis and CPUs are being largely soaked up by the mesoscale datacenter builds.
Net net, this sucks. And my expectation is that Hetzner will still be the cheapest game in town by about the same percentages as before. It the costs keep going up, I think we will see the fediverse starting to struggle.
Between the absolute crush of bot registrations and the spiraling costs, I have been contemplating moving to a required donation for new accounts.
Or we could talk about how wildly inefficient Lemmy is.
The prices for my servers basically increased by 30% I thought about consolidating my 3 VPSes in one big VPS for all 3 instances, but I have not gotten around to it, and I am not sure if I will actually go through with it...
My instance runs on a dedicated server at hetzner, from their server auction. My price only increased like 3%, which is honestly lower than inflation given how many years we've been at that price point. So I'm completely fine with it. I've not heard of these enormous price hikes before.
Pretty much the same here. I have an old AX41-NVMe for applications (including mail server, mastodon and lemmy) and an even older one from the server auction for files (running Nextcloud with their storage boxes as the backend seems pretty fiddly). Both have increased around 3% so I'm fine.
They did send out emails with the new pricing a couple of months ago and I saw that some newer servers and especially cloud stuff get massively expensive, though.
A long-time mastodon contributor is shutting down their instance - https://vmst.io/@vmstan/116757564108266599
Small instances close down all the time but in this case it's not just anyone's instance.
This new environment will provide developers with an incentive to find ways to rein in their platform's storage and CPU usage.
This new environment will provide developers with an incentive to find ways to rein in their platform’s storage and CPU usage.
We wish! Honestly this kind of stuff should be done in, like, C. Maybe in Fortran. Not in a "framework of the week" language.
Storage is now more important than ever. Thank you for reminding me. Mbin should auto cleanup it's old storage.
I've been thinking about auto-unfollow, too. For example if an account hasn't logged in for 6 months they unfollow everyone and leave all communities (but preserve the records of their subscriptions so they can be automatically re-follow/joined if they log in again).
Then that one guy who subscribed to all those anime communities a year ago won't cause your instance to receive anime forever.
I host on my own hardware. Hopefully said hardware will continue to last for a long time.
This also calls for more optimisation from the developers, meaning less use of resources on the hardware.
Kinda shocking what you can do with your own R720
The next shoe to drop will be when S3 object storage prices double or triple. That'll really thin the herd.
For sure, there are a LOT of conventional services that only exist because of cheap storage.
Object storage at Hetzner already went up by a lot, but for us peons, who really cares? Object storage was always stupidly expensive and most of us have just used the local storage on our servers, or else the very cheap (but somewhat slow) Storage Box product for backup.
I have one of their auctioned servers, so the price increase was just three percent. Since the auctioned servers are all legacy hardware, I don't expect any sharp price hikes in these.
I’m running my server on my own hardware, so all of my sevices will be fine
👌
Several admins had moved away from Hetzner because of some of their policies, so they impact may be smaller than expected
I'd be curious to know what those admins switched to (if you have any idea).
I don't remember, it was a while back
You might be thinking of vultr
They've hugely increased the prices for the higher priced virtual servers. Dedicated server prices have also gone up but not anywhere near as much. I've had a lower-end auction dedi for several years and it's a few bucks more per month now than when I got it way before the shortages. In fact after I got it, prices of comparable servers dropped by quite a lot, though I didn't bother migrating.
I think it was only newly purchased servers.
Fucked me. Their explanation was super reasonable, but I'm still hosed.
Mine lives on my shelf so.. not?