This blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD

26 points by eduard

eduard

I also migrated my VPS from a US providers (Vultr) to a European one (netcup).

The support for working with FreeBSD from Vultr was quite good, in contrast to Hetzner you could pick FreeBSD as your VPS' OS when configuring it, you don't have to work with the ISO image and run through the installer. That was maybe the only reason that made me hesitate about migrating to Hetzner.

Then I found netcup and decided to migrate my VPS. It is suuuper cheap. I haven't found anything that comes close to it. I got the vServer lite plan VPS piko G11s with 1 core, 1 GB RAM and 30 GB SSD for €1.84 a month. Installing FreeBSD on a VPS on netcup is as easy as doing it on Hetzner, if not easier.

I am now paying the least I have ever payed for a VPS and I got my data out of the US :D

ocramz

netcup

TIL! Looks like I'm overpaying servers on GCP between 3 and 4x. Will look into migrating.
- hoistbypetard
  
  I've been splitting my stuff between netcup and hetzner for about a year. Despite billing me in Euros for a server in an eastern US data center (whose datacenter is almost certainly next to the bike path that I ride on when I want to go for a long ride) I've found netcup less expensive and as reliable as DO, Linode and Hetzner. (I like Hetzner quite a bit too.)
  
  The only downside I've seen to netcup is that you buy VPSs for a month at a time. i.e. You can't spin one up for a couple hours and only pay for those hours, last I checked. It also took me a little longer to orient myself to their control panel.
- fab23
  
  If you only need a simple server / VM then this is a useful solution. European VM hosters (or even US based hosters) are mostly less expensive then the large international services like AWS, GCP and others. The flexibility of instance types and availability of additional services may vary, so check beforehand what else you need. You could also create a small test system to play with the service.
proctrap

Heyho, 14y fellow netcup customer here - so far has been a good provider for all my needs. Though I only used their root-server options so far.

Their IOPS aren't the highest compared to my bare-metal systems but it really, really does the job. Worst I've had was 1h outage when my rack had an issue and then it was back running without anything missing - plus their cost-free 24/7 support (if an issue on your end) was really helpful here.

From what I've read some of their more advanced offerings (failover IP etc) aren't that good, so YMMV. I know their prices are now increasing (as communicated first in the forums and then via mail) due to the AI hardware demands* but it's still much better & cheaper than other offerings I've seen.

* their CEO stated in the internal forum, that they don't trust any bought hardware to be actually delivered until it happened

jturner

I use OpenBSD Amsterdam for my OpenBSD VPS. I've been super happy with them and they donate back to the OpenBSD project.

citizen428

Same. I love that they donate to OpenBSD, but I also appreciate the personal touch.

eduard

On the very first try, I noticed a real problem with my new FreeBSD server. It was failing rather early, because it couldn’t handle 10k concurrent connections. After a lot of research, I found out that you can check the size of the socket queue with netstat -Lan, and it was all 128. Turns out kern.ipc.somaxconn was stock-set for that number. So I increased it [...]

I checked my own system for that setup variable with sysctl -a, but I couldn't retrieve any value.

Then, in the manpages listen (2) I found out that kern.ipc.somaxconn has been replaced since FreeBSD 10.0 with kern.ipc.soacceptqueue.

The original sysctl(3) kern.ipc.somaxconn is still available but hidden from a sysctl(3) -a output so that existing applications and scripts continue to work.