alt Hacker NewsFediMeteo: A €4 FreeBSD VPS Became a Global Weather Service
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I’m doing a similar thing with open-meteo for surf forecasts (for myself primarily)
Only one region, but could quite easily expand. It takes the open-meteo ocean data and combines it with some short and long range weather. Then run a preprocessed refined version of that through an LLM to turn it from quantitative into qualitative. It basically does what I would do in my head.
If you have any ideas, please let me know
Enjoyable read. I wish I'd paid more attention to the *BSDs when I was younger because I'm set in my Linux ways now and simply cannot find it in myself to try them. The ZFS plus jails support seems to have been the low friction way that he managed things here.
I use podman, but I haven't ever tried ZFS on Linux, instead just relying on an LVM of the drives. I will remedy at least that last error soon since I want to set up a personal archiver and you can't realistically do timelines without the deduplication that ZFS gives.
Lovely to see someone building something that doesn't require Kubernetes over 4 AWS AZs, DynamoDB, S3, Lambda etc etc.
IIRC, HN itself runs on modest hardware as well (just 4-cores, also FreeBSD).
> German provider with 4 shared cores, 4GB of RAM, 120GB of SSD disk space, and a 1Gbit/sec internet connection
Where on earth did he find €4 VPS with these specs. For example Hetzner's cheapest VPS has 2 shared vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 40 GB NVME SSD.
The cheapest I found is https://contabo.com/en/vps/ but it still doesn't have 1 gb/s connection with that price.
Edit: typo
4 euro servers are good.
I got a similar specced server for around 5$ I guess but it has 400 gigs of storage or 500 and I think all around it might be worth it.
But to be fair it was a deal for 3 months for 8$ with vouchers and everything and Its only been a month but after the 3 months, I would have to pay 5$/5Euros but I think it might be worth it, not sure but there is definitely this power of not leaving once you have started to own a vps or similar, that pull is definitely real :)
OVH is good company too, one of the cheapest overall in the markets. Some people themselves resell OVH servers or white-sell it, they are chill in this manner
I think one of the benefits of OVH is its unlimited egress policy. Upcloud and OVH are the only two which offer something similar I suppose and I think OVH is on the more cheaper side but Upcloud support team did feel phenomenal to me (I wish I was sponsored by them)
Pro tip but I have heard from people to talk to OVH through their twitter. I don't use twitter but yeah, also another idea for support could be to join their discord too, I think one of the core people once answered my simple question there (how to run docker in ovh servers/automate it) but they didn't answer some other question regarding the tos of ovh or similar which I can admit could be not sure if we should ask a developer about such things idk but overall all of these are pretty good options to pick!
There is just something fun about optimizing about server prices and support and just this grid-like optimization that takes place in your head when you are interested in things like this.
I once had an idea of buying the domain "freeofcharge.org", where people could put useful services that fit into RAM onto subdomains, meaning services that cost them only ~10$ per month, which they pay out of their own pockets.
"I would pay close attention to accessibility: forecasts would be in local languages..." There are many situations where somebody is interesting about the local weather but not speaking the local language. Why overwrite the users preferred language from the browser?
Amazing project I understand why FediFollows helped it get more visibility https://social.growyourown.services/@FediFollows/11565141936...
Such a cool project. Thanks for building it. Amazing what one can do with a tiny VPS.
great write up and breakdown of the project. you can do a lot with a small VPS
Very cool! And TIL about snac. It’s fascinating how tiny and practical fediverse/ActivityPub components can be. Truly brilliant design and architecture. Thanks for sharing!
I want to do something similar, not for fediverse or anything, but an easy way to get a pretty html and/or markdown version of any current special weather statement(s) for any zip code/area/city etc.
Aw man. Great write-up and implementation of an exact thing I've started to build myself, except I was build it stateless on Cloudflare Workers. Love this!
Awesome project! I’ve always dreamed of making my own weather service so this is a great inspiration.
This is awesome! Small projects like this that take off are fun to read.
Maybe I'm imaging it but FreeBSD really seems to have far less bloat than Linux distros and better latency. I just setup a $4/mo FreeBSD VM on Vultr with 1G RAM and 1vCPU and it's only using 12% of RAM with Caddy. A VM with 4GB of RAM and 4 vCPUs could serve a lot of traffic.
I'm wanting to create a personal blogging with a retro BBS-like web app with a text first interface with a multi-threaded Nim server + sqlite. I'm sure something exists already but it'd more for my own tinkering. No containers, no async, no javascript libraries. Just a small 4MB binary and FreeBSD. This posts encourages me on the FreeBSD route!