After a decade on a DigitalOcean VPS running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, the author migrated the blog to a Hetzner virtual machine and switched the stack to FreeBSD. The original server in New York cost $13 per month and had been out of security updates for five years, prompting a move to a more reliable, cheaper host. it had accumulated several unused packages over the years.

Hetzner’s cheapest offering starts at 3.56 euros, but the author chose a 2 GB RAM, 2 vCPU plan for under €6 a month, doubling memory and CPU while providing ten times the traffic allowance. The German data centre reduces latency for European visitors. The new server runs FreeBSD 14.3, uses ZFS snapshots for backups, and isolates each site in a Jail managed by Bastille.

The migration script now pushes changes, pulls the repo on the host, and runs Hugo inside the appropriate Jail, simplifying deployment. Benchmarks show comparable load times to the old Ubuntu setup despite the containerized environment. The experiment proves that a modest Hetzner box running FreeBSD with Bastille can replace an aging Linux VPS without sacrificing performance in production today.