I’ve been hosting this blog on a Hetzner VPS for nearly a year and it has been working very well. It’s been interesting to run an Ubuntu server myself and get to do some small sysadmin tasks. Hetzner has also been rock solid, there’s been no downtime other than me rebooting to upgrade the Linux kernel and so on. I did get a notice once that they experienced an issue that affected my server, but I didn’t notice anything, there was no noticable downtime. So Hetzner get a 10 out of 10 from me, can recommend!

However, recently I discovered Netcup, another German hosting provider with a similar offering to Hetzner, only cheaper. The cheapest Hetzner VPS isn’t expensive but Netcup is cheaper. This also opens up for getting more resources, while not really paying much more. So I decided to switch.

What initially drew me in was that Netcup allows you to upload your own ISO images to run whatever OS you want, as long as it works under KVM. That they are also a little cheaper was a nice bonus.

I’ve always liked FreeBSD so when switching providers I wanted to switch OS as well. I did want to run FreeBSD on Hetzner, but it wasn’t possible to order and they have no way to mount a custom ISO. I did try the “trick” where I downloaded a small boot-only image, rebooted to rescue mode, wrote the image to the disk and restarted again to start the FreeBSD installer, but I just couldn’t get it working. I got the installer started, but I just couldn’t figure out the disk partitioning, so I gave up and settled for Ubuntu.

I’ve later learned that Hetzner have both FreeBSD and OpenBSD available as options if you go to reinstall your server so I could have just done that. Oh well.

I’ve also learned that they can mount a custom ISO for you if you contact support, provide a download link they can just input in their system and it just works without them doing anything else, but that seemed a little cumbersome.

Another positive for Hetzner is that I find their administration pages easy to understand and navigate. Netcup is a little different in that regard. The link on the main page have you log on to one domain, where they have the product information, like what products you have bought, your invoices and so on. Then you have to log on to a different domain (yes, completely different, not a subdomain) to control your VPS. To be fair they have a single-signin solution in place so you are automatically signed in. Also to be fair, with Hetzner you will have to select “account” or “invoices” in the top-right hamburger menu, and you are taken to a complete different page to view your invoices, but it still feels more natural than the way Netcup are doing things.

With Netup, they have menu options on the left-hand side, and when you switch between them, the more hidden menu in the top right corner also changes content. The huge area in the middle also changes content of course but it does not feel as intuitive to me to first select something on the left side, then select something in the top right corner, and then doing the thing in the middle. My personal wish is that the top-right menu should be more connected to the content in the middle.

A minor gripe, and why did this end up being a Hetzner vs Netcup comparison when the title is “server downtime”?

Anyway, I got FreeBSD installed, I got caddy installed in a jail (FreeBSD containerization technology that predates docker by quite a while) and all was looking good. Then one morning, perhaps a week after I set it up, I woke up to my server being down. Since I’m using full disk encryption, I have to log on to the console and type my password to decrypt the disk for the server to start. I found it went down at around midnight, and I wasn’t able to start it again until around 7.

Not a good feeling right now. Yes it is cheaper, but is that why it is cheaper? Remember I had run my Hetzner VPS for nearly a year with any kind of downtime except my own reboots, and with Netcup the server goes down about a week in.

I know it’s just a practically no-traffic blog I write for myself, but I still prefer the services I pay for to work without too much hassle. My Hetzner server has been deleted, but we will see. If Netcup keeps going down like this I’ll probably move back, it might be worth the extra money. I hope it’ll stay stable and that I was just unlucky, because I really like the extra RAM I got which is nice when running ZFS. I also want to explore more around jails and how to manage them, for instance with Bastille.