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# Two years? Hold my beer! Did I say "two years" last time? Amateur hour! As usual, there has been a trigger event to make me touch this site again, after mere _seven_ years. This time, my hosting provider decided to take a piss upwind. In 2025, amidst all of Europe arguing to _get rid_ of dependencies on US-based IT infrastructure, they announced to discontinue their own email services, force-migrate everyone to Microsoft 365, and charge an additional €0,99 per month, _per email account_. Now, I've been paying them quite a pile of money already, about €250 per year - for a web hosting packet, a small virtual private server, plus two domains and a SSL certificate for the VPS. Which is a stupidly large sum for what I'm getting (and using) in return. So those additional €2 per month for both my email accounts wouldn't have made a large dent in the grand scheme of things, but their audacity made me move my lazy ass, realize _how much_ I've been paying, say _kiss-my-ass-goodbye_ to our 23 years of customer relationship (my .de domain was registered in 2002), and move everything off their systems in about 2-3 days. This brand new copy of my website is now running on a small, neat cloud server, hosted by [Hetzner][hetzner], powered by [YunoHost][yunohost] and [Roundcube][roundcube]. This is the very first time I ever manage my own email server, so I guess I'll have to see how often and bad I mess things up... The server, plus its .com domain, will cost me about €60 per year. I also learned how to not be a total idiot about paying €35 a year for issuing a SSL certificate. YunoHost pretty much automates this for Let's Encrypt certificates, but I also found that using [certbot][certbot] myself is no rocket science either. Now, double those €60 for another VPS and a domain for my personal networking software development shenanigans, and I end up at __about half__ the yearly costs. So far, configuring the Hetzner servers has been a breeze, esp. compared to the shopworn admin backend I've been used to until now. Into the self-hosted future! [hetzner]: https://hetzner.com [yunohost]: https://yunohost.org [roundcube]: https://roundcube.net [certbot]: https://certbot.eff.org