[HN Gopher] FediMeteo: A EUR4 FreeBSD VPS Became a Global Weathe...
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FediMeteo: A EUR4 FreeBSD VPS Became a Global Weather Service
Author : birdculture
Score : 160 points
Date : 2025-12-30 19:21 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (it-notes.dragas.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (it-notes.dragas.net)
| dashzebra wrote:
| Ooh just what I needed, thanks!
| draga79 wrote:
| thank you!
| ajoseps wrote:
| great write up and breakdown of the project. you can do a lot
| with a small VPS
| draga79 wrote:
| thanks!
| blain wrote:
| > German provider with 4 shared cores, 4GB of RAM, 120GB of SSD
| disk space, and a 1Gbit/sec internet connection
|
| Where on earth did he find EUR4 VPS with these specs. For example
| Hetzner's cheapest VPS has 2 shared vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 40 GB NVME
| SSD.
|
| The cheapest I found is https://contabo.com/en/vps/ but it still
| doesn't have 1 gb/s connection with that price.
|
| Edit: typo
| draga79 wrote:
| this: https://www.netcup.com/de/server/vps/vps-500-g11s
| riedel wrote:
| This one was slightly above 4 EUR (but without any minimum
| contract duration)
|
| Here are actually the 4 EUR and below offers:
| https://www.netcup.com/de/server/guenstige-vserver-angebote
|
| Funnily I on first sight could not find the same page in
| english.
| 47282847 wrote:
| https://www.lowendbox.com/ is a popular source.
| lbotos wrote:
| I came here to fight you but there are some low end boxes
| with lots of ram and disk for pretty cheap!
|
| Found this as an example: https://lowendbox.com/blog/black-
| friday-bytehosting-is-here-...
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| The bytehosting deal is good too! Oh btw lowendbox has a
| forum called lowendtalk where hosting providers etc. talk
| as well and show deals etc. and I got part of the community
| (you need to register and be verified manually but it
| wasn't hard)
|
| Lowendbox is amazing. Glad we are talking about it as I
| recently joined it and the community's really supportive
| and honestly feels more so in the sharing spirit and I even
| talked about why people use lowendhosts etc. and got some
| pretty good answers imo
|
| Although do be beware to stay away as there are some
| hosters which end up going completely down. So go with
| someone reputable as well and there is whole lore beneath
| in this forum :)
|
| Racknerd,dedirock are usually recommended, I recommend
| https://serverdeals.cc/ etc. I have a list which I can
| recommend after being in the community for some time and
| here's some websites which I recommend for suggestions
|
| https://serverdeals.cc/
|
| https://vpspricetracker.com/
|
| https://getdeploying.com/
|
| Honestly I still recommend hetzner tho because these are
| some really really good deals but hetzner just has this
| reputation of more stability and I jsut have more faith in
| hetzner and its a "good enough" option imo and there are
| even some lowendhosts who kind of do share the fact that
| hetzner is very price competitive.
|
| I personally had gotten a 2$/month 1TB vps hosting (yeah
| didn't really end up using it much aside from the shock
| factor/running yabs on it)
|
| and also I got a 3 month 8bucks deal with netcup using
| their vouchers and everything to get 8 gigs of ram 4vcpus
| etc and honestly this was the best deal I ever saw but I
| will have to pay 5 bucks I guess after the 3 months end.
|
| Most of it is remaining idle tho :< Are there any services
| I can run for the benefit of humanity (like running some
| self hosted services that can help anybody out there or
| smth?)
|
| Let me know if you have any questions! I might be able to
| help you as I was active on lowendtalk till quite recently
| numpad0 wrote:
| How did these came to existence? Most of these offerings
| look basically identical. Is it ran by the same guy
| behind, or is it like a get rich quick network business
| stuff?
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| To be honest there is one instance that i know of where
| what ends up happening is that colocrossing a major vps
| provider does end up doing something like this (they used
| to be hosters/owners???? of lowendtalk/lowendbox)
|
| Now another aspect is that the hosting economy is very
| mutual, they all start out somewhere and they are usually
| friendly towards each other. Most Hosting providers start
| out by either using reseller service directly or by
| colocating or by reselling dedicated servers which can be
| themselves of other providers
|
| I don't know but the community is both cut throat and
| chill at the same time. It's strange to point this
| phenomenon but I think my point of their friendliness is
| something which depends and I don't know much about it
| but I once asked people on lowendtalk if I wanted to
| create a cloud provider myself and I got some responses
| and they were friendly so I am basing it off of that
|
| Another aspect is that the market has already raced to
| the bottom super hard. Hetzner/OVH are really cheap, so
| to get even cheaper, you kinda have to be in the same
| pricing range I guess
|
| Fun or not so fun fact but do you know that there have
| been cases of lowendbox providers to actually go shut
| down because they take these completely no profitable
| sense deal and actually lose money sometimes. VeloxMedia
| is a recent example of that and there is still
| controversy surrounding it.
|
| There is also the fact that the scam industry in this
| department works as such:
|
| Rent a really big server with lots of cores for a few
| months
|
| Sell them unreasonably in LET for the year pricing or
| more
|
| Then sell the company/be unable to provide/etc.
|
| these I think are called as deadpools in the community.
|
| Also regarding your comment behind same guy, there are
| sometimes family relations between people
|
| as an example, racknerd I think is owned by the stepson
| of the owner of colocrossing and they I think using
| colocrossing themselves.
|
| These have their own little drama stories and I think
| this is just the tip of iceberg as I just joined recently
| and probably digging through old archives.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Some of these are resellers. Big provider sells them a
| package of 10-1000 VPSs and they set up websites to sell
| them to you. But you can also find lots of direct deals
| as well. BuyVM famously has their $15/year deal on a 1GB
| VPS. You can also often find dedicated servers for like
| $25/month. I recently bought a $75 lifetime deal on some
| email hosting for up to 25 domains and I think 250GB
| storage. Great for some secondary domains and such that I
| use. There are some real gems out there and you should
| see their Black Friday threads. Kind of a wild place.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| buyvm used to have one (not with those specs) for like $5 a
| year with 256 MB I used to love buying one or two of those for
| simple stuff.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| I am also of a similar belief but I recently found exe.dev on
| hackernews and I am kind of play-testing with it and the dev
| seems active on hackernews and on the discord so I am
| definitely giving it a go
|
| Gullos Hosting which has 128 Mb server for 3.5$/yearly and
| also for $4.49 you can still get a 256mb server from
| C-servers and $5.50 from byteVirt.
|
| But also, there is fact that one can probably just buy
| hetzner servers or upcloud servers or similar idk. I will
| probably try to get some free services and then transition to
| hetzner/upcloud/netcup when my project needs more
| scalability/is shown to be of valuable to the general
| public/interests regarding it.
|
| Honestly I got a 8 gig netcup server for 5$ and so I got it
| out of their limited deals section but I am thinking of just
| holding it and probably gonna use it extremely because with
| the rising prices etc., I think its good enough too as well
|
| I just love yapping about server prices and comparing them
| etc. I think I just love a good deal lol.
| KomoD wrote:
| > Gullos Hosting which has 128 Mb server for 3.5$/yearly
| and also for $4.49 you can still get a 256mb server from
| C-servers and $5.50 from byteVirt.
|
| I can't recommend Gullo's. I experienced near-constant
| network issues with my NAT VPS (in Poland, I think?),
| making it so unusable that I just let it idle until it
| expired. I should've spent the money on a 6 pack of beer
| instead, it is what it is.
| awesome_dude wrote:
| > now is a 4 euro per month VPS in Milano, Italy - 4 shared
| cores, 8 GB RAM and 75GB disk space.
|
| He didn't - he found a better specced one in Italy for that
| price
| draga79 wrote:
| Exactly. Same price but better specs. The current provider is
| OVH and they recently started to host VMs in Italy.
| Yeri wrote:
| there's EUR1 and EUR2 VPS too:
| https://www.strato.nl/server/vps-linux/ (not sure what the
| quality is but -\\_(tsu)_/-)
| weiliddat wrote:
| IME strato is OK for cheap VPSes as long as you don't have
| high expectations.
|
| 5-6 years ago, I remember trying to scale up to the 16/32GB
| tier was miserable and oversubscribed; moving to Hetzner at
| the same price point brought a huge performance boost (mostly
| on CPU and disk access speed).
| weiliddat wrote:
| Don't want to ding strato exclusively, likely the case for
| most $1-$4/month type hosting.
|
| Not bad as long as you know what you're getting yourself
| into.
| bix6 wrote:
| Awesome project! I've always dreamed of making my own weather
| service so this is a great inspiration.
| draga79 wrote:
| Thanks!
| terespuwash wrote:
| Amazing project I understand why FediFollows helped it get more
| visibility
| https://social.growyourown.services/@FediFollows/11565141936...
| draga79 wrote:
| Thank you!
| elcritch wrote:
| This is awesome! Small projects like this that take off are fun
| to read.
|
| Maybe I'm imaging it but FreeBSD really seems to have far less
| bloat than Linux distros and better latency. I just setup a $4/mo
| FreeBSD VM on Vultr with 1G RAM and 1vCPU and it's only using 12%
| of RAM with Caddy. A VM with 4GB of RAM and 4 vCPUs could serve
| _a lot_ of traffic.
|
| I'm wanting to create a personal blogging with a retro BBS-like
| web app with a text first interface with a multi-threaded Nim
| server + sqlite. I'm sure something exists already but it'd more
| for my own tinkering. No containers, no async, no javascript
| libraries. Just a small 4MB binary and FreeBSD. This posts
| encourages me on the FreeBSD route!
| draga79 wrote:
| Thank you!
| elcritch wrote:
| BTW, how do you feel about ActivityPub in general?
| draga79 wrote:
| I like it. It's not perfect, but it's a good way to make
| sure that platforms will continue to be able to federate.
| They're evolving and things will improve. The experience is
| much better today, compared to some years ago.
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| Unbloated distros exist, Alpine is one example. I was taken
| aback how snappy it is. Does everything without any undue
| delay. Merely logging in via SSH feels quicker as you don't
| have to wait a second for the prompt like on Ubuntu. apk is
| also super fast.
| elcritch wrote:
| True Alpine is pretty snappy. I don't like using it as muslc
| has given me headaches before. Arch is faster generally too
| but not as much. Maybe there's something with systemd stuff.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| One could probably use VoidLinux or Gentoo with glibc I
| suppose if one might want leaner than arch but more heavier
| than arch
|
| Although VoidLinux's iso size I think is larger than
| ArchLinux or something which doesn't make that much sense
| but I don't really know but both are good references to
| check out.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Alpine is really good for servers.
|
| Man I love alpine even though I don't use it so much but
| alpine does hold a special place in my heart for some reason
| (and i think the reasons are good)
|
| Tinycore is another one which holds a special place in my
| heart, partially because its the most no BS simple alpine-
| like os that I have seen which is rather focused on the
| consumer side, so you can get GUI systems super quickly and
| minimalist.
|
| The minimalist tinycore iso with gui and terminals ran on
| 21-40 MB :) let that sink in
|
| They showed as 0.0% or 0.1% on my 8 gig computer.
|
| I used tinycore to take my really old laptop which my brother
| used to game on mostly and was super dead, it was a dell mini
| pc with intel atom 1 gig of ram 32 bit, probably 10-15 years
| old
|
| I ran tinycore on it with no problem and ended up with wifi
| access and then even ran modern firefox browser and ended up
| even running a website like https://pomodorokitty.com/ on it
|
| Man,do i love them both.
|
| I genuinely just wanted to create a service which could just
| boot tinycore gui servers in the browser perhaps via novnc
| for people to play with but I seriously wondered who might
| pay for the project
|
| Oh btw oops forget that you can already do that by just
| downloading the iso of tinycore and then going to copy.sh/v86
|
| In fact that inspired me to create the project but one of the
| issues of copy.sh/v86 is that its ephemeral and runs directly
| in your browser so if you close it whereas I thought of
| having a mini-server-like tinycore where I can get a gui mini
| server and can quickly open/close it with terminal and even
| heck modern browsers.
|
| Everyone should try out tinycore just once imo. The
| simplicity of 21 MB is mind boggling to me. Makes one really
| wonder what bloat really is I suppose, definitely a fun
| experience.
|
| Oh also I love alpine because I ran it in my phone using
| UserLand and I loved it although running python in alpine was
| a bit of mess on my phone and I think I ended up doing some
| wizard magic or something using g-compat in the end as well
| to run it. Although I think termux is pretty good and even
| better than UserLand in this context because UserLand runs
| emulated where Termux doesn't I guess but not sure.
| babo wrote:
| "I would pay close attention to accessibility: forecasts would be
| in local languages..." There are many situations where somebody
| is interesting about the local weather but not speaking the local
| language. Why overwrite the users preferred language from the
| browser?
| draga79 wrote:
| It doesn't. You can Always translate the text in your favourite
| language. The project aims to send the forecasts to the users,
| so can't be multilingual. Anyway, that's the reason why there
| are the emojis. Those ones are international.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| 4 euro servers are good.
|
| I got a similar specced server for around 5$ I guess but it has
| 400 gigs of storage or 500 and I think all around it might be
| worth it.
|
| But to be fair it was a deal for 3 months for 8$ with vouchers
| and everything and Its only been a month but after the 3 months,
| I would have to pay 5$/5Euros but I think it might be worth it,
| not sure but there is definitely this power of not leaving once
| you have started to own a vps or similar, that pull is definitely
| real :)
|
| OVH is good company too, one of the cheapest overall in the
| markets. Some people themselves resell OVH servers or white-sell
| it, they are chill in this manner
|
| I think one of the benefits of OVH is its unlimited egress
| policy. Upcloud and OVH are the only two which offer something
| similar I suppose and I think OVH is on the more cheaper side but
| Upcloud support team did feel phenomenal to me (I wish I was
| sponsored by them)
|
| Pro tip but I have heard from people to talk to OVH through their
| twitter. I don't use twitter but yeah, also another idea for
| support could be to join their discord too, I think one of the
| core people once answered my simple question there (how to run
| docker in ovh servers/automate it) but they didn't answer some
| other question regarding the tos of ovh or similar which I can
| admit could be not sure if we should ask a developer about such
| things idk but overall all of these are pretty good options to
| pick!
|
| There is just something fun about optimizing about server prices
| and support and just this grid-like optimization that takes place
| in your head when you are interested in things like this.
| FitchApps wrote:
| Such a cool project. Thanks for building it. Amazing what one can
| do with a tiny VPS.
| xd1936 wrote:
| Aw man. Great write-up and implementation of an exact thing I've
| started to build myself, except I was build it stateless on
| Cloudflare Workers. Love this!
| isodev wrote:
| Very cool! And TIL about snac. It's fascinating how tiny and
| practical fediverse/ActivityPub components can be. Truly
| brilliant design and architecture. Thanks for sharing!
| lexicality wrote:
| Lovely to see someone building something that doesn't require
| Kubernetes over 4 AWS AZs, DynamoDB, S3, Lambda etc etc.
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