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Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner: From $1,432 to $233/month With Zero Downtime (isayeter.com)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 13 points 6 months ago (6 children)

A trick I realized a few years ago: Caddy has a module you can build it with that does WOL. So I was able to run a Caddy reverse proxy that woke up my higher powered server on demand, and let it go back to sleep when I wasn't using it. Might be a bad idea for a database sever, but for my uses it was pretty simple and effective.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago (4 children)

    Oh wow, that’s really cool! I do use Caddy too.

    Is it that your service/website is on both (low powered server and high powered one) or is it only on the high powered? So, it’s like

    • the lower powered server knows it needs help (sounds a bit surreal to me, but perhaps it’s doable)
    • or the lower powered server does not serve anything, but wakes up the high powered when the thing is accessed?

    I guess that’s the 2nd thing, but it’s very cool indeed! That way you can really have very convenient things for free, as it’s super cheap to run any hardware for a very while on demand. I don’t mind waiting a minute or even two when I need to access something very infrequently and don’t want to run my server 24/7. I do exactly that, but I wake up it via LAN manually.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    The low powered server is the Caddy server, all it does us act as a reverse proxy for everything in my house, giving it an SSL cert and doing things like WOL. The caddy config basically just says "Here's your reverse proxy target, if you don't get a response within one second, send a WOL packet, wait a couple of seconds, then try again".

    The only requirement is for you to do a custom build of caddy (this is done with a dockerfile), and to have WOL enabled on the high power server.

    It means the first web request for services on the high power server might take a few seconds, but everything after that is smooth.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (2 children)

    Is it that high power server takes a few seconds to boot? What’s the hardware you have there? I’m curious that’s the average boot time for an average high power server? I do use heavily obsolete devices for my personal servers (think of DDR-2 era devices with Intel Atom or sometimes core 2 duo devices) usually without even SSDs. With an SSD, my desktop devices (all DDR-3 era with SATA-3 disks) boot within 20…30 seconds, which is good enough for me. I assume the more modern devices would be quicker, but [single-digit, I assume] seconds sounds very good. To me, that sounds like it’s a no-brainer to have this feature. I was thinking whether I can wait minutes for something I need occasionally to boot. Seconds is just too fast. I think that delay is tolerable even for a commercial / production server, where the expectations are just different.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    I'm not shutting it down, just sleeping it. My high powered server is a gaming PC from a few years ago. Running Linux, my best case scenerio for cold boot would still be 10-20 seconds, but wake from sleep is near instant.

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