This blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD - Bruno Croci

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This blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD

May 21, 2026

This blog has been running on a Digital Ocean VPS for over ten years. A machine hosted in New York City, running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS . An LTS that hasn’t been in support for at least 5 years. It was about time to change it. After some considerations, I migrated to a Hetzner virtual machine that is way better than my old Ubuntu one, less than half the price of what I used to pay, and just across the country from me. Not only that, but I took the challenge to move my stack to FreeBSD . It’s a long text, but stay for a cool introduction of FreeBSD Jails with Bastille and some interesting site load benchmarks.

Motivation

If you know how releases on Ubuntu work (I’m not very familiar myself), once the release is out of support, the apt package repository is out, so you can’t get any updates from it anymore. There are several implications of running such an outdated system, and the most obvious is that your server is just not as secure anymore. There might be several bots out there just trying to find nodes with vulnerabilities to introduce malicious stuff onto them. Luckily (I think), nothing ever happened. Not that there was anything important to be stolen in there either way. But I remember a long time ago, one WordPress blog that I had, which was also running on an old VPS, randomly got a lot of very suspicious links to casino and gambling spread across the text in the posts.

I was already using a Hetzner VPS as a remote development machine, where I SSH into from anywhere, and it’s been a reliable good VPS for the price. So I decided to start by comparing the specs. This was the droplet running my blog and my other websites:

My old Digital Ocean server

That has 2GB of RAM, one vCPU, 50GB disk, 2TB of monthly traffic and runs Ubuntu 16.04 x64. It’s located in their datacenter in New York City. That’s probably why it’s so expensive, I was paying $13 monthly for that.

Hetzner is an established European IT company and has big data-centers in Germany, where I live. The cheapest Hetzner server I could get, at only 3.56 euros is already way better than my old one:

A cup of coffee per month

Double the memory and CPU, slightly less storage space, but ten times more traffic. But I decided to go with a beefier setup, for less than €6 a month:

A fancier cup of coffee per month

It might even be a bit overkill for my sites, but why not?

The old setup

My old setup was serving a few more sites than just this blog. Nothing too popular; this blog, the most popular of all sites in there, wouldn’t get more than a couple thousand page views a month. Except when a couple of posts went viral on Hacker News, there wasn’t a lot of traffic. In the end, the machine was basically serving static sites, no fancy CGI or custom code running. The stack was simple. Everything was served with nginx/1.10.3 , statically. So I’d just basically have several config files in /etc/nginx/sites-available for each one of the sites. Extra necessary programs like static site generators and a LaTeX suite (e.g.: this blog is generated by Hugo ) were installed either via apt or snap. In fact, my process to update my blog was:

write the text locally

commit and push to the repository

ssh into the server

pull the repo updates

run hugo

During the first years of this VPS, I also used it to run some tests and do some programming. So it was bloated with a lot of outdated software that I didn’t use anymore. But it worked. And worked quite well.

Yep, it was running Linux 4.4!

So well, in fact, that its uptime was 1491 days when I shut it off! That’s roughly 4 years without interruption!

Why FreeBSD

Not gonna lie, one of my main motivations was to get my hands on something different. I’ve been reading and watching a lot of stuff about BSDs in general, and I had a short previous experience with FreeBSD, so I thought it would be a good way to put it to a real-world test. FreeBSD is usually praised for its stability, due to its integrated design, security, and Jails . We’ll get to that in a bit.

I don’t wanna sound like I knew exactly what I was doing, but when I read about Jails , I knew exactly what I wanted to do. Jails is a form of virtualization/containerization that’s been part of FreeBSD for over 25 years, way before Docker was even a thing. At first glance, it does exactly what you’d expect from a Docker container: it sandboxes a “minisystem” within it so you can run stuff that doesn’t have access to your host system. The main difference, I think, is that Docker and other container solutions are more suited for “packaging programs”. It’s ephemeral and immutable. It will operate on...