Hosting

Hetzner introduced Ampere Altra Arm64 processors as an option for their cloud servers in April this year. I hadn’t tried them until recently but they seem to perform on par with the Intel offerings at similar price points at least in my anecdotal testing on some small instances. The pricing is quite good (as low as €3.79 per month in the US market). You save €0.50 if you use IPV6 only which might be OK for some use cases.

FOSDEM has many interesting presentations. I watched this interesting and informative session by Sanja Bonic and Janos Pasztor that discussed using ContainerSSH to create a honeypot to observe system attackers. I’d not heard of ContainerSSH before and it’s a really interesting tool that creates a container and connects an SSH user to it. The honeypot example was a nice illustration of what you can do with it but there are some other interesting use cases as well for eduction and ephemeral system provisioning.

I’ve been a customer of Hetzner Cloud for a few years. The TLDR; is that it’s a solid service that is worth taking a look at if you want low prices for virtual machines if you don’t mind rolling your own solutions for many things. Prices are very competitive. A basic system with 1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM and 20 GB of disk is €2.89 ($3.42). This includes 20 TB of traffic which is plenty for most small projects.