Blog/2024-02-25/Racknerd

I have some sites on Cloudflare Pages and they're pretty damned fast, but when I started this blog/wiki, I wanted to make it a bog standard Linux machine just like anything else. And I wanted it to be a wiki so that anyone could edit it. Those requirements sort of led me down a rabbit hole I haven't been down for some 18 years now: low-cost VPS solutions.

There's lots you can find on the Internet, but the one that was best for me was Racknerd. Their Racknerd Pro site seems to perplexingly link to a deal you can't get anywhere else from them: 2 GB of RAM and 2 Ryzen 7950x vCPUs (which is like one real processor) for $30/year. That's some $3/month which is really quite excellent.

I still use Cloudflare for storage, mounting R2 using S3FS and using it for all the videos and stuff that you see.

I haven't yet worked out how to make Cloudflare cache the Mediawiki-generated pages (they all claim to be dynamic, but I'm sure it's just some page rule in the Cloudflare settings) but when I do, I bet they'll be fast too. For the moment, they're just generated and cached on the machine and then served out of there.

Good enough, I think!