By no means an orchid fanatic, it does please me when they rebloom, and only then will I show them here
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On This Day
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What I’ve watched
I keep a little log.
By no means an orchid fanatic, it does please me when they rebloom, and only then will I show them here
It’s now been a bit more than three months since I first opened an account on Hetzner and a week since almost everything (not the DNS for this domain) switched over, so I thought it was a good time to recap.
The main points in favour are:
On the debit side, specifically for the web hosting package:
rsyncFor sure, my not-altogether-great experience was the result of rushing forward with too little, er, experience. It made me realise that for as long as I have been online and dabbling, I have never really understood how servers work.
My first effort, for example, was to host my photo portfolio on a naked server. There are plenty of tutorials, but I failed to find any that explained why I should prefer nginx over Caddy, or vice versa, and those that favoured Apache (the only one I know) often omitted the details of actually installing Apache. Of course I could have spent a lot more time doing the research and pulling together my own instructions from here and there, and maybe that’s something I ought to do, but in the end I slavishly followed one person’s instructions and ended up with something that worked, though not without some hair-tearing frustrations.
The great thing about a server on Hetzner is that you can have SSH access, which allows you to do maximum damage with minimum effort and also enables reasonably simple day-to-day maintenance when required. It is also very easy to create S3 compatible buckets, so I could move my backups and podcast audio files away from Amazon S3. Without SSH, however, things like updating a file or creating an off-site backup or deleting a directory are much more tedious.
When it came to moving dynamic sites, I tangled myself in knots. The tutorial for multiple sites (sub-domains or actually different domains?) was for an OS I knew nothing about. The one for the OS I did know said nothing about either sub-domains or separate domains. Could I translate the instructions successfully? Don’t I have better things to do with my time? Finally, however, my confusion got the better of me and I went for the web hosting package instead, with the drawbacks I listed above, and despite the drawbacks, I am very happy to have made the transition.
The biggest problem I have is that searching online very seldom turns up the kind of extra information I need. People seem to have absorbed their background knowledge by osmosis or in other ways unavailable to me. And when I have finally got to where I want to be, I find I have failed to make a note of all the steps it took, so I cannot easily recreate the path for my future self or anyone who wants to follow my path.
One final example of the difficulties I created for myself. In creating a server, you get various options for passwords and key pairs, and you’re expected to know exactly what to choose. I didn’t, and spent far too many hours trying to figure out why logging on was so temperamental. Then I read this brilliant guide: Setting up an IRC server. Alas, it was published after I had thrown in the towel, but I am now armed with the information I need to have another go at the server thing. Eventually.
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