Now on three continents

This website is now hosted on three continents.

I recently changed the hosting for this site to fly, since I was rather intrigued by the idea of being able to run three small VMs (Virtual Machines) worldwide for free. I would gladly have paid a small amount for their services. If they didn’t have a free allowance for VMs then it would only be around $6 a month, so I’m not worried about them removing the free allowance.

Previously it was running on one Hetzner VM in Nuremberg, Germany that I set up and maintained myself. The maintenance wasn’t a problem for me, but rather the idea of slow loading times for anyone reading this outside of Europe.

American visitors should notice a definite speedup now, as there’s a server on the west coast and for the few visitors in the Asia-Pacific region, there’s also a server in Australia. I kept track of the response time before and after the change using the Online or not Do I need a CDN? tool, which you can see in the table below (measured in ms)

Region	Before	After
Europe (Frankfurt)	62	32
US East (N. Virginia)	348	185
US West (N. California)	503	61
Asia Pacific (Tokyo)	732	251
Asia Pacific (Sydney)	1114	76

I do find it rather amusing that I spend more time tinkering with the site than actually posting anything, but, for once, tinkering has actually led to me posting something (this post). I would like to think that this might encourage me to post more in the future, but only time will tell.