Moving to Europe (part 2)

Sun, 13 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The saga continues

After I moved my (three) domains, most of the DNS, and my static websites to Europe I got side-tracked. An interaction with a former colleague nudged me to pick that back up.

Services

When I last wrote about it I thought I would land on UpCloud or Scaleway for a virtual server (or two), but now I'm actually working with a virtual server at Hetzner. They do things a little bit differently, so I'm still getting used to that. Both have projects, which feels like the mental model equivalent of AWS VPCs? Hetzner has performance/usage graphs integrated into their web UI, whereas Scaleway has a hosted Grafana service (for which you need to create a dedicated user). Hetzner's virtual servers seem more generous with their root volumes, but then it may not be as easy to change that out later, so choose wisely?

That said, for something that mostly needs to be compute, storage, and a web presence, Hetzner's offerings seem quite nice.

Currently I'm putting together a "services" instance that will host things like webmail (Roundcube), bookmarks (Readeck), passwords (Vaultwarden, or something along those lines), etc. This would be the same Services project hinted at in the Read Later project page. The goal here will be to make it relatively painless to blow it away and spin it up elsewhere, so a layer of Terraform, some cloud-init fun, and automatically generated and managed LetsEncrypt certificates are going to be part of that.

Object Storage

For this, Scaleway still seems to be the most reasonable price, in particular for buckets with not a lot of content. Hetzner starts at 4.99 Euro for even an empty bucket (which then gets you 1TB of storage and traffic), by comparison. That's a non-starter for a bucket where I expect to have just a few dozen GB of data. For completeness, UpCloud's buckets also start at 5 Euros which then includes 250GB of storage, and states there are no data transfer fees, period?

Open questions

For moving my mail server I still need to do some research to find out which of these 3 (or some alternative I've overlooked or discarded unfairly) is the better pick in terms of IP reputation, or spam abuse complaint handling. Anyone know?

Previously

Moving to Europe

Read Later

Sun, 13 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Status

Active since July 2025.

What

A self-hosted bookmark/read-later service

Where

https://readeck.is-here.com/

How

This service is setup as one of several virtual hosts on a virtual machine that is dedicated to a couple of these self-hosted things (the project page for is still WIP/AWOL for now).

To try and keep the maintenance requirements relatively low I used the docker approach, only sharing the data with the host system so that it is preserved over restarts and can be backed up regularly:

  docker run \
         --detach \
         --rm -ti \
         -p 6080:8000 \
         -v /var/www/readeck:/readeck \
         codeberg.org/readeck/readeck:latest

A fragment of the Apache configuration file:

  ProxyPreserveHost On
  ProxyPass / http://0.0.0.0:6080/
  ProxyPassReverse / http://0.0.0.0:6080/
  RequestHeader set X-Forwarded-Proto https

Disclaimer: I don't have a lot of experience with the proxy or proxy_http modules, so it's possible that could be done better. There are more complete instructions on the Readeck Deployment documentation page.

Integrating it:

For Firefox I use this Readeck add-on.
There is no iOS (or Android, for that matter) app but the (self-hosted) website can be added as a pseudo-app on iOS by using Safari's "Add to Home Screen".
That pseudo-app doesn't get you a "Share to …" entry, but thankfully there are acceptable workarounds (listed in the FAQ) in the form of shortcuts. It took a little bit of fidgeting to figure out how to configure the shortcut, but after that it was relatively smooth sailing.
Although it's somewhat redundant, I also created a script to check my Mastodon bookmarks and import new ones into Readeck. So if I'm in a hurry, I'll quickly bookmark a ~~post~~ toot, otherwise I'll use the "Send Page + Tags To Readeck" shortcut.

Code and related things

Originally I had planned to migrate from Instapaper (the read-later service I used for ~15 years) to a self-hosted Wallabag instance, but before the dust had even settled on that (meaning figuring out what browser add-on to use or how to integrate it on my phone) this post by Shom pointed me towards Readeck. That's why the scripts below have a migration path from Instapaper -> Wallabag -> Readeck, and not Instapaper -> Readeck.

My collection of scripts in this read-later repository.

wallabag_import.py: Iterate over the Instapaper entries and add them one by one to my (also self-hosted) Wallabag service. For the ~17k bookmarks that I had that took multiple hours and possibly got my IP in trouble with a few websites.
readeck_wallabag.py: Initiate a migration from Wallabag to Readeck (handled entirely by Readeck after that).
reprocess_readeck.py: Loop over all bookmarks in a Readeck collection, re-adding them and deleting the original ones as it goes.
bookmark_readeck.py: Check my Mastodon bookmarks and add any new ones to Readeck

Self-hosting on East of the Sun, West of the Moon