A new server at Hetzner.DE

By Abhijit Menon-Sen <>

For the last five years, toroid.org has lived on a server hosted at Hetzner.DE. It has served me very well during that time (with a disk failure the only major problem), but I have finally outgrown its modest hardware configuration (Athlon XP 2000+, 512MB of RAM). The need for a more capable machine was recently made very clear to me when the Yahoo crawler decided to index archives.aox.org, and my machine spent several days swapping things in and out (it worked fine, it was just very slow and the other services suffered).

Two weeks ago, Hetzner's RP39 dedicated server plan (Athlon 64 X2 5600+, 2GB RAM, 2*400GB disk, for €39/month) caught my eye, and I wrote to them to ask about upgrading to it. I had two important questions: could I keep all my existing IP addresses? And could I order an RP39 server with 4GB of RAM installed? Surprisingly, I received no response for a week, despite sending two reminders. When I finally heard from them, I was rather disappointed with the response.

No, I couldn't keep my primary IP address or my IPv6 /64 subnet. I could move the IPv4 /29 subnet for €99 plus €15/month, which was as good as not being able to keep it. No, I couldn't order an RP39 server with 4GB of RAM because… it was no longer available! Sure enough, they had removed RP39 from their order page before responding to my message. The only sensible course of action available was to order an EQ4 server (Intel i7-920, 8GB RAM, 2*750GB disk) for €149 plus €49/month, accept that I would have different (and fewer) IP addresses, and migrate data and services the hard way.

I spent a couple of days being disappointed about the disappearance of RP39, but knew that Hetzner was within their rights to discontinue what was always described as a limited "special offer". The EQ4 cost a little more than I liked, and the migration would be painful, but I ordered one on the 20th of August. Hetzner said they expected it to be online within 24 hours, which I took with a pinch of salt (it took three days for them to bring up my old server). To my surprise, my shiny new EQ4 machine was up and running within two and a half hours from the time of my order!

Now to complete the migration quickly…