Hetzner

Imagine you have a name tag. The name tag says deeka.work. You wear it every day. Friends type the name. Browsers fetch the name. In your head, the name is the website, the way “home” is a house, not a GPS coordinate that happens to currently point at a house. Then one afternoon you move the house. You do not move the name tag. You just… point it at a different building. And for a while, two buildings both think they are you. One of them is in Helsinki. One of them is “region Earth,” which is Cloudflare’s way of saying everywhere and therefore nowhere in particular. Your normal browser tab still visits Helsinki. An Incognito window visits Earth. You hard-refresh. Earth shrugs and hands you a 404. Two roommates who were never in the moving boxes, a trading journal called Sudden and a hobby project that belongs to my brother, are suddenly homeless, because they were living in the building, not in the name. ...

There’s a special kind of person who talks to themselves while migrating servers. I am that person. This post is basically the black-box recording of me moving two hobby projects-an auth service and an expense tracker called Pennywise-off Hetzner and onto Contabo, while Coolify, Cloudflare, R2, Postgres, and one very stupid vault mistake all tried to teach me humility. If you’re here for a clean architecture diagram and zero drama: leave now. This is the other kind of migration story. ...