Egee's Big Infrastructure Migration

Hello Hobbyists! I've finally reached the end of my big infrastructure migration project. It was a harrowing journey—let me tell you about it!

I'm thrilled to announce that I've set sail from Linode and successfully landed at DigitalOcean. This switch was six months in the making as I dealt with high costs and overages from how VPS instance scaling works. My estimates show that switching to DigitalOcean will cut my cloud spend in half!

Why is Linode so expensive?

It's not—until it is. VPS providers typically offer very cheap products and even cheaper services (free!), but they have to make their money somewhere, right?

I fell into the same trap many small or solo operators fall for: scaling. When you launch an instance, it comes at a fixed rate. What happens if that size doesn't fit? Scale up!

That sounds great in theory (and it is, honestly), but if you don't have a plan to scale down, you're in for a rude surprise. There's no native way to do it. Instance sizing is based on system resources (CPU, memory, etc.) but especially disk size. Once your disk scales up, you cannot scale it down.

Picture this: An indie creator has a website with little traffic. Something happens and suddenly their website is swamped. Scale up! But what if you scale up too far or traffic drops? 💸

Why Digital Ocean?

I used DigitalOcean for a client while freelancing and enjoyed it. It didn't have everything I thought I needed at the time, so I went with what I knew—Linode. Since I have to rebuild my infrastructure anyway, why not try something cool and new?

I've rebuilt my infrastructure in DigitalOcean, and it's definitely the right choice for me. It's been very developer-friendly with ample documentation and easy API references. I also really like their interface, although Linode's is nice too—it's basically a single page for everything.

My experience with Linode this time around hasn't been great. I've had numerous DNS resolution issues, and to this day, I haven't figured out how to empty that object bucket to delete it. The features they've added don't appeal to me, and they haven't updated their web interface in a very long time.

Homelab Plans

While I finished the cloud migration, the homelab isn't complete. I took Adguard down for servicing, and Nextcloud is still running with all those console errors.

For the homelab, I have an arsenal consisting of a Rpi4, Rpi5, and two old Celeron machines. I want a media server, home automation hub, DNS server, and Nextcloud. I'm pretty sure with these rigs, I can make something work!