I’ve been a fan of renting my own servers, rather than renting space on someone elses- for various reasons. Security, sustainability, et al.

Well, recently it became less than ideal to manage my own node just for this (and a few other) sites. So, I went looking around, and found some great NetCup deals.

Today, Hetzner has entered the ring. They’re starting off with a 2GB, 20GB storage, 20TB KVM service for about $3/mo.

That’s about half what I paid for managed hosting just a few years ago! Being a KVM, that means the entire virtual system is yours- whatever OS you want (not just a Linux setup with an ancient kernel, as is the case with OpenVZ). They’re supporting FreeBSD and OpenBSD out of the box.

The administrative interface is very rudimentary, but it already allows you to (sub)group them for different tasks. Brilliant.

I was always a fan of Hetzner’s hosting, but their network topology is a little strange (and it still is). I’ll probably post a few “this is how you make it work” notes.