Hetzner2

In 2016, OSE purchased a dedicated hosting plan from Hetzner. We call this server 'hetzner2'.

Prior to this, we used a shared hosting plan from 2011 (on a dedicated host, but without root access) from hetzner for about the same price, though it was much less powerful (AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+ Processor, 4 GB RAM, 2x 400 GB Harddisks, 1 Gbit/s Connection). We call this server 'hetzner1'.

In 2018, we consolidated all our sites onto the under-utilized hetzner2 & canceled hetzner1.

Hetzner2 was a CentOS 7 server with 4 CPU cores, 64G RAM, and 2x 250G SSDs in a software RAID1. When I (Michael Altfield) adopted this system in mid-2017, it was already built & but running only the Open Building Institute website. I heavily modified its config, added varnish as a cache (64G RAM!) + nginx for https, and migrated all our sites onto it.

OSE server specs on Hetzner as of June 2016. Older server had only 4 GB RAM - compared to the 64 GB in the upgrade - which is 16x performance at lower cost. Thus, OSE should assess new server plans at Hetzner every few years due to dropping cost of hardware.

Migration to Hetzner3

In July 2024, we began migrating from Hetzner2 to Hetzner3, mostly to switch from CentOS to Debian.