From Namecheap to Hetzner for hosting

For the longest time, over 12 years now I have always used Namecheap as my platform of choice for domains and hosting. They checked off a lot of boxes for me, from domain ownership and offering a wide range of TLDs to affordable pricing and renewals discounts on domains and lastly web-hosting.

Over the years I collected a wide range of domains on my namecheap account, ranging from short domain ownership projects to long lasting ones (my own company domain is with them for 10 years now). As time went on I had more experience to tinker with servers and coming up with solutions to my problems, one giant appeal of namecheap was they did everything for me. From hosting, DNS setup, to SSL certificates all in matter of button clicks.

Looking back now I guess you could say I spent a little too much money on SSL certs and hosting? But I think it was worth it for me to get to where I am today that I was able to learn slowly and get into the groove of things.

My last hosting plan with namecheap expired today, on 22nd of April 2024. This is a web-hosting that I had in combination with my company domain for over 10 years, so backing it up and exporting the files within it, took quite a long while. I have since then moved my personal, partner, friends and company sites all out of the namecheap hosting into a new ✨ hosting server ✨ from Hetzner.

At the moment I am on their cheapest plan, because what I am doing supports it and I do not feel the need to spend more for something I am not going to use. Setting up the server was pretty smooth, the setup process walks you through the steps by holding your hand and within a few minutes you got a running server you can ssh into.

Now it runs mostly docker containers, this website and many a few others. It does run some discord bots via PM2 (have not yet figured out how to run node properly inside Docker).

All in all, I am pretty with Hetzner and looking forward to whatever new things I am going to host and tinker with!

*This is a direct re-post from my personal site zeren.xyz