As I mentioned previously, owning your own domain is a tremendous help when you want to migrate services, as it is much easier to change where a DNS record points then it is to change your email address every single place you are registered.
My website has always been a small, low-traffic site. All I need is enough to run a WordPress website with a custom domain and well under 1 GB of storage. In most any provider that means the smallest or second-smallest plan. The pay-as-you-go service provided by NearlyFreeSpeech has been a very good match for my needs until now.
Looking at european-alternatives.eu and applying some local knowledge, I narrowed it down to three good candidates: OVHCloud (France), Hetzner (Germany) and Domeneshop (Norway). Hetzner is getting a lot of buzz as a local challenger to the American hyperscalers, and both it and OVHCloud have solid-looking and well-documented offerings. Domeneshop I know from previous use to be very good, but they have, well, Norwegian prices.
Hetzners web hosting plans have an interesting model where you pay an up-front fee to establish the site, then get the domain purchase and renewals included in the monthly price. OVHCloud has a lower monthly price but domain renewals are a separate yearly expense (with the first purchase/renewal for free). Since my domain is pre-existing and recently renewed, I had to break out a spreadsheet to figure it out.
The jumps in the graph are for domain renewals. If I had intended to keep the domain less than 21 months, OVHCloud would have been cheaper, but Hetzner edges it out over time. It also has a name that sounds like something out of Blade Runner. Therefore I have moved my domain and website to Hetzner.
Hetzner’s web hosting tools are pretty easy to use, although I miss having the ability to ssh in and muck about more directly with things. (That’s reserved for the next step up in web hosting plans with them.) Installing WordPress, importing all my backups from the old host and setting up a Let’s Encrypt certificate went well. As an added bonus, this site is now available via IPv6!
The domain transfer was also quite painless (which of course also reflects well on NearlyFreeSpeech). All the emails from Hetzner are unmistakably German, that is to say conducted in impeccable English, very polite and always making certain to include information about my rights as a consumer and how to contact them. This is the sort of EU goodness I’m looking for.
The next part of the project will be swapping email & calendar providers, as well as some continuing progress on entertainment services and social media.
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