Hetzner2

In 2016, OSE purchased a dedicated server EX41S-SSD from Hetzner. We call this server 'hetzner2'.

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.

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 (8 threads), 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.

Migration to Hetzner3

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