[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  : 375 points
       Date   : 2025-12-30 19:21 UTC (1 days 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.
        
               | Imustaskforhelp wrote:
               | There are lots of even cheaper deals than buyvm usually
               | with racknerd and dedirock. Black friday deals are
               | absolutely amazing but always go with someone a bit more
               | reputed and Buyvm's an amazing choice too although they
               | would be considered "pricey" in comparison to someone
               | (just a few $'s) (I have joined their discord server)
               | 
               | I think racknerd recently did a 6.85$ or similar deal but
               | the point of these deals become is that they become
               | insanely overprovisioned and it becomes a showpiece of
               | sorts "look what deal I got ;P" kinda not sure.
               | 
               | I think another fascinating deal about lowendtalk is that
               | man those people have this faith in small hosting
               | providers and giving chances to them etc. hoping that
               | they become big as well. There are very few places like
               | lowendtalk on the internet. I find a lot of similarities
               | with the hackernews culture although more focused on
               | deals/hosting although its definitely more casual than
               | hackernews.
        
               | IgorPartola wrote:
               | The weird thing is that it seems like some people are
               | almost addicted to buying these boxes and I am not sure
               | if the use cases. It almost has a feeling of gambling.
               | 
               | I used to get boxes from there for a specific product I
               | had (ability to ping from multiple places around the
               | globe to see what your latency was like) and one provider
               | did burn me but the rest were pretty great.
               | 
               | I just wish more of them provided a proper native IPv6
               | stack. Still can't understand why this isn't standard for
               | all.
        
               | Imustaskforhelp wrote:
               | > The weird thing is that it seems like some people are
               | almost addicted to buying these boxes and I am not sure
               | if the use cases. It almost has a feeling of gambling.
               | 
               | Oh boy I had thought about this too. There are only quite
               | a few uses of the completely cheap one. Perhaps for the
               | chinese people, it acts as a VPN
               | 
               | Like I thought about the use cases and they were hard for
               | me to find when you consider all the "free" stuff that's
               | launched too. I think to me, some aspects of lowend are
               | for the novelty factor (oh a 2$ 1TB server sign me up!)
               | and what ends up happening is that I didn't really use
               | the storage much so my opinion was nice whereas someone
               | else who used it said that, it's a bad deal
               | 
               | You are right about this though, but still its just
               | fascinating to find the deals and then like the fact is,
               | they are still pretty small and you can just go talk to
               | them and I think this customization and more discussion
               | (hey does your product allow my usecase) etc. are some
               | few reason
               | 
               | I once asked on the forum why they aren't using
               | hetzner,upcloud etc. and someone replied with the fact
               | that they want to make the small one win.
               | 
               | I don't think its completely gambling but you may end up
               | buying something that you don't need much (I ended up
               | with a netcup 8 gig server I guess) in a similar way. But
               | now I kind of know that beating hetzner,ovh, (upcloud's
               | more expensive) is possible perhaps but that if you want
               | ton of servers fast and cheap, there is a possibility but
               | I might still recommend companies like
               | hetzner,ovh,upcloud etc. for any professional use, its
               | just I would be thrown less under the bus as compared to
               | if I have somebody idk set up in dedirock
               | 
               | One of the reasons why I stopped frequenting lowendtalk,
               | might go next black friday perhaps but I don't even know,
               | like there are tons of services now which can offer vm's
               | cheap and fast and just similar to what you might buy
               | from that. There are tons of these I use so I don't
               | really know if buying cheap servers might make sense
               | 
               | One of the reasons I (liked?) the idea of buying cheap
               | servers is that one can always scale when needed and they
               | could then use something like these lowendproviders
               | instead of vercel who initially might be free but then is
               | super expensive. But I think that we are seeing some
               | options which are free but not gonna be super expensive
               | or that expensive perhaps.
               | 
               | The thing is, to me, its nice knowing a place like
               | lowendtalk exists. I might go into its rabbit hole again
               | or not I guess but I don't really know.
        
               | toast0 wrote:
               | There's some commercial software to sell/resell VPS, etc
               | that some of these outfits use.
               | 
               | And it's pretty much a commodity business, so things are
               | going to tend to look similar. If you're buying $5/month
               | VPS, you don't want to pay for a lot of fluff. A lot of
               | these are small time local hosters in a single location,
               | but that's usually all you need for a small site.
        
               | Imustaskforhelp wrote:
               | Its usually WHMCS + virtfusion
               | 
               | There are alternatives but usually all just go use these
               | for some reason
               | 
               | This is also why a lot of these websites might look
               | similar as well.
        
               | tn1 wrote:
               | WHMCS is probably the easiest batteries-included tool for
               | the job, giving billing, management, and a customer
               | support portal. These could be unbundled or reinvented
               | but for your average hosting company there's no point in
               | doing so.
        
               | ksec wrote:
               | LowEndBox is as old as HN and has been doing VPS deals
               | before the cloud took over. There are also deals offering
               | for VPN services as well.
        
               | p2detar wrote:
               | I'm on Hetzner as well; migrated from DigitalOcean. They
               | are stable, but they got a bit of bad reputation, since
               | they were hacked at least 2 times already [0] [1]. Stable
               | != Secure.
               | 
               | 0 - https://www.heise.de/news/Hetzner-gehackt-
               | Kundendaten-kopier...
               | 
               | 1 - https://www.zdnet.com/article/hackers-breach-web-
               | hosting-pro...
               | 
               | edit: links
        
           | elxr wrote:
           | Wow, this is amazing. Tempted to try one of their $2/month
           | suggestions.
        
             | selcuka wrote:
             | A random provider could be a hit-or-miss. I've personally
             | used RackNerd (found them on LowEndBox/Talk) in the past
             | and can't complain for the price. They have plans under
             | $1/month, and they even provide an IPv4 address:
             | 
             | https://www.racknerd.com/BlackFriday/
             | 
             | No affiliation, just a happy customer.
        
           | znpy wrote:
           | I had wildly varying experiences with companies i found on
           | lowendbox.com
           | 
           | Some were fine, some offered a very good yearly plan but
           | vanished after three weeks.
           | 
           | So yeah... people should keep that in mind.
        
         | 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.
        
         | Aurornis wrote:
         | Be careful when comparing core counts across providers. Those
         | ultra cheap providers are using servers that can be many
         | generations old. They might also be heavily oversubscribed. 4
         | vCPU on one of the cheap providers could be slower than 2 vCPU
         | or even 1 vCPU on a newer generation server. You really have to
         | test or look at benchmarks.
         | 
         | If you have a RAM-constrained application where CPU and RAM
         | speed are less of a priority, they can be great deals though.
        
         | sva_ wrote:
         | Oracle Cloud gives you 4 oCPU (ARM), 24GB ram, 4Gb/s (10TB),
         | 200GB NVMe SSD for free.
         | 
         | Although some people say it is difficult to get an instance
         | nowadays. But it worked for me and I've been using it for more
         | than 2 years now. Some say that free tier users sometimes get
         | booted, that's why one should upgrade to a paid account.
        
           | joecool1029 wrote:
           | I have one for testing arm64 stuff on Gentoo. Worst signup
           | I've ever had with a company.
           | 
           | Once I got account I could not spin up server until
           | converting my account to paid. They've never charged a fee
           | but they won't let you use 'always free' instances in busy
           | regions until you convert to a paid account.
        
           | LaurensBER wrote:
           | The registration process is so cumbersome and annoying that I
           | gave up. At that moment we were in contact with Oracle for a
           | business contract at work, the horrible sign-up process,
           | increasing CDS (Credit Default Swap) spread and risky AI
           | investments made me decide to cancel the POC.
           | 
           | If your sign-up tier is so frustrating to use that you loss
           | sales and you cannot fix it as a company, that doesn't
           | inspire confidence in the rest of the infrastructure...
        
             | loloquwowndueo wrote:
             | If your company is small enough that you don't have a full
             | procurement department to deal with all this, you're of no
             | interest to Oracle :)
        
             | vjerancrnjak wrote:
             | I cant even register.
        
       | 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.
        
             | jaypatelani wrote:
             | If you liked tinycore check this one https://smolbsd.org/
        
             | yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
             | Alpine is also pretty good as a desktop OS; I've got a
             | desktop and laptop on Alpine, and another laptop on
             | postmarketos (Alpine derivative).
        
               | Imustaskforhelp wrote:
               | Interesting, I had looked at postmarketos but it was too
               | bloated for me perhaps the last time I looked as compared
               | to tinycore which was truly super minimalist
               | 
               | Like is there a way to get postmarketos with something
               | like jwm or anything small perhaps? I would love to give
               | alpine desktop a try, I think I did the disservice of not
               | trying it enough then if you mention this
        
               | yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
               | IMO the only reason to use postmarketos is if your
               | hardware doesn't support normal Alpine. If you've got a
               | normal x86 machine, just install Alpine, run setup-xorg-
               | base, apk add jwm, maybe some minor setup I'm forgetting,
               | and you're set.
        
             | timc3 wrote:
             | Alpine used to leave performance on the table by default.
             | Something to do with the compiler having a lot of safe
             | options and not using some CPU extensions at the time.
             | 
             | Don't know whether it is the case anymore, but it's
             | something I proved in the past and then engineering
             | deployed minimal Debian instead because it ended up being
             | cheaper.
        
         | YorickPeterse wrote:
         | For Linux this will vary between distributions and
         | configurations. For example, based on some testing I did today
         | using mkosi [1] (for reasons unrelated to this discussion), a
         | bare-bones Fedora 43 installation uses about 130 MiB of RAM,
         | while a Debian installation uses a little more than 100 MiB.
         | 
         | IIRC last time I tried a bare-bones FreeBSD installation it
         | used about the same amount of memory, maybe a little more based
         | on how ZFS is set up.
         | 
         | [1]: https://github.com/systemd/mkosi
        
           | tiltowait wrote:
           | ZFS will happilly (and intentionally) gobble up available RAM
           | for ARC. On my 64GB system, ARC is using 42.4GB, but this
           | memory is quickly reclaimable if it's needed. That said, I
           | had very bad experiences trying to run ZFS on an
           | underprovisioned system.
        
         | realusername wrote:
         | The BSD utils are always much nicer to read than the GNU ones
         | when you want to understand what's going on, there's no
         | competition.
         | 
         | I do prefer the GNU style licensing model & popularity but for
         | the code itself, I prefer the BSD ones.
        
         | ErroneousBosh wrote:
         | > retro BBS-like web app
         | 
         | You mean like oldschool dialup BBSes, or a forum-style
         | "Bulletin Board"? If the latter, take a look at FlaskBB :-)
        
         | andai wrote:
         | I somehow remember Linux using half the resources it does
         | today, 20 years ago. It occurs to me now for the first time,
         | that this might be due to the switch to x64.
         | 
         | That's probably not the only reason but it bothers me that I
         | never considered that before! I remember at some point it used
         | twice as much RAM for basically the same thing, and I remember
         | being bothered by that.
         | 
         | But I guess what you get in exchange for that is the ability to
         | put in basically unlimited RAM.
        
           | bityard wrote:
           | It's just the price of progress. When I started playing with
           | Linux, a full fledged Linux desktop with web browser and all
           | ran very happily on a machine with 16 megabytes of RAM. At
           | the time, there were distributions that fit on a floppy disk.
           | 
           | Both are more or less impossible now, but I don't think we
           | should think of 100mb of "background state" as bloated. The
           | fact that your can get a lot of useful stuff done on Linux in
           | under 512mb in 2026 while Windows and Mac need multiple GB
           | just to get out of bed is pretty awesome.
        
         | johnisgood wrote:
         | > have far less bloat than Linux distros and better latency
         | 
         | I think this has always been the norm from what I remember.
         | That said, Arch Linux, KISS, Void, etc. are minimal enough,
         | IMO.
        
         | nicoburns wrote:
         | FreeBSD may have less bloat, but I'm running a web server in a
         | Linux container (debian-slim - so not even as small as you can
         | go with linux) with only 256mb RAM (of which it is only using
         | ~64mb).
        
       | 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!
        
         | iamkonstantin wrote:
         | I like the idea that you can follow cities and they appear in
         | the timeline. Also knowing it's all just markdown - let's just
         | say it's refreshing to have things that don't endeavour to
         | operate on hyperscale.
        
       | lexicality wrote:
       | Lovely to see someone building something that doesn't require
       | Kubernetes over 4 AWS AZs, DynamoDB, S3, Lambda etc etc.
        
       | tiffanyh wrote:
       | IIRC, HN itself runs on modest hardware as well (just 4-cores,
       | also FreeBSD).
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28479595
        
         | ritcgab wrote:
         | To be fair, that is 4 dedicated cores not shared with other
         | tenants.
        
         | s4mbh4 wrote:
         | > 2 package(s) x 4 core(s) x 2 hardware threads
         | 
         | Its not 4 , but 16 'cores' 2 packages = dual cpus on the same
         | motherboard.
        
       | arjie wrote:
       | Enjoyable read. I wish I'd paid more attention to the *BSDs when
       | I was younger because I'm set in my Linux ways now and simply
       | cannot find it in myself to try them. The ZFS plus jails support
       | seems to have been the low friction way that he managed things
       | here.
       | 
       | I use podman, but I haven't ever tried ZFS on Linux, instead just
       | relying on an LVM of the drives. I will remedy at least that last
       | error soon since I want to set up a personal archiver and you
       | can't realistically do timelines without the deduplication that
       | ZFS gives.
        
         | iamkonstantin wrote:
         | > I wish I'd paid more attention to the *BSDs
         | 
         | Same! I've been trying to reduce complexities in my stack (e.g.
         | Docker) and while systemd exists, I think the concept of
         | "jails" or sandboxes is quite neat. I love tools that come with
         | better out-of-the-box readiness.
        
           | DCKing wrote:
           | systemd nowadays has a lot of sandboxing built in [0]! You
           | can achieve jails using just systemd and no separate
           | container manager.
           | 
           | [0]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd/Sandboxing
        
       | indigodaddy wrote:
       | I want to do something similar, not for fediverse or anything,
       | but an easy way to get a pretty html and/or markdown version of
       | any current special weather statement(s) for any zip
       | code/area/city etc.
        
       | sails wrote:
       | I'm doing a similar thing with open-meteo for surf forecasts (for
       | myself primarily)
       | 
       | Only one region, but could quite easily expand. It takes the
       | open-meteo ocean data and combines it with some short and long
       | range weather. Then run a preprocessed refined version of that
       | through an LLM to turn it from quantitative into qualitative. It
       | basically does what I would do in my head.
       | 
       | If you have any ideas, please let me know
       | 
       | https://surfrash.xyz/
        
         | nrhrjrjrjtntbt wrote:
         | Nice. I think that site for any beach would be useful. Like how
         | it is descriptions rather than a wall of data.
         | 
         | Request for manly, nsw, australia otherwise :)
        
           | sails wrote:
           | Nice, does require some local knowledge to get it at all
           | useful (if you can email me some info in what conditions work
           | I can set one up for you.)
           | 
           | Is there a high res weather model for Aus? That makes a huge
           | difference as well
        
             | nrhrjrjrjtntbt wrote:
             | Thanks. I dont want to bother you as I assumed it would be
             | just a case of pulling a feed but sounds like there is
             | more. Plus I dont surf too often! I think they would have a
             | high res weather model https://www.bom.gov.au/weather-and-
             | climate/rain-radar-and-we... but not sure if it is.
        
               | sails wrote:
               | Cool thanks, yes all good, yes there is basically a combo
               | of knowledge dump and assembling raw weather data to
               | apply the knowledge to, I haven't done another location
               | yet, but maybe wait for a few more requests :D
        
       | fzeindl wrote:
       | I once had an idea of buying the domain "freeofcharge.org", where
       | people could put useful services that fit into RAM onto
       | subdomains, meaning services that cost them only ~10$ per month,
       | which they pay out of their own pockets.
        
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