So I got the job. Here's a story, never let anyone stop you from accomplishing your dreams!

It all started in 2010. Windows just crashed unrecoverably for the 3rd time in two years. Back then I wasn't good with computers yet so we got our tech guy to look at it and he said: "either pay for a windows license again (we nearly spend 1K on licenses already) or try another operating system which is free: Ubuntu. If you don't like it anyways, we can always switch back to Windows!"

Oh well, fair enough, not much to lose, right! So we went with Ubuntu. Within about 2 hours I could find everything. From the software installer to OpenOffice, browsers, email things and so on. Also I already got the basics of the Linux terminal (bash in this case) like ls, cd, mkdir and a few more.

My parents found it very easy to work with as well so we decided to stick with it.

I already started to experiment with some html/css code because the thought of being able to write my own websites was awesome! Within about a week or so I figured out a simple html site.

Then I started to experiment more and more.

After about a year of trial and error (repeat about 1000+ times) I finally got my first Apache server setup on a VirtualBox running Ubuntu server. Damn, it felt awesome to see my own shit working!

From that moment on I continued to try everything I could with Linux because I found the principle that I basically could do everything I wanted (possible with software solutions) without any limitations (like with Windows/Mac) very fucking awesome. I owned the fucking system.

Then, after some years, I got my first shared hosting plan! It was awesome to see my own (with subdomain) website online, functioning very well!

I started to learn stuff like FTP, SSH and so on.

Went on with trial and error for a while and then the thought occured to me: what if I'd have a little server ONLINE which I could use myself to experiment around?

First rented VPS was there! Couldn't get enough of it and kept experimenting with server thingies, linux in general aaand so on.

Started learning about rsa key based login, firewalls (iptables), brute force prevention (fail2ban), vhosts (apache2 still), SSL (damn this was an interesting one, how the fuck do you do this yourself?!), PHP and many other things.

Then, after a while, the thought came to mind: what if I'd have a dedicated server!?!?!?!

I ordered my first fucking dedicated server. Damn, this was awesome! Already knew some stuff about defending myself from brute force bots and so on so it went pretty well.

Finally made the jump to NginX and CentOS!

Made multiple VPS's for shitloads of purposes and just to learn. Started working with reverse proxies (nginx), proxy servers, SSL for everything (because fuck basic http WITHOUT SSL), vhosts and so on.

Started with simple, one screen linux setup with ubuntu 10.04.

Running a five monitor setup now with many distro's, running about 20 servers with proxies/nginx/apache2/multiple db engines, as much security as I can integrate and this fucking passion just got me my first Linux job!

It's not just an operating system for me, it's a way of life. And with that I don't just mean the operating system, but also the idea behind it :).

A few days ago Aruba Cloud terminated my VPS's without notice (shortly after my previous rant about email spam). The reason behind it is rather mundane - while slightly tipsy I wanted to send some traffic back to those Chinese smtp-shop assholes.

Around half an hour later I found that e1.nixmagic.com had lost its network link. I logged into the admin panel at Aruba and connected to the recovery console. In the kernel log there was a mention of the main network link being unresponsive. Apparently Aruba Cloud's automated systems had cut it off.

Shortly afterwards I got an email about the suspension, requested that I get back to them within 72 hours.. despite the email being from a noreply address. Big brain right there.

Now one server wasn't yet a reason to consider this a major outage. I did have 3 edge nodes, all of which had equal duties and importance in the network. However an hour later I found that Aruba had also shut down the other 2 instances, despite those doing nothing wrong. Another hour later I found my account limited, unable to login to the admin panel. Oh and did I mention that for anything in that admin panel, you have to login to the customer area first? And that the account ID used to login there is more secure than the password? Yeah their password security is that good. Normally my passwords would be 64 random characters.. not there.

So with all my servers now gone, I immediately considered it an emergency. Aruba's employees had already left the office, and wouldn't get back to me until the next day (on-call be damned I guess?). So I had to immediately pull an all-nighter and deploy new servers elsewhere and move my DNS records to those ASAP. For that I chose Hetzner.

Now at Hetzner I was actually very pleasantly surprised at just how clean the interface was, how it puts the project front and center in everything, and just tells you "this is what this is and what it does", nothing else. Despite being a sysadmin myself, I find the hosting part of it insignificant. The project - the application that is to be hosted - that's what's important. Administration of a datacenter on the other hand is background stuff. Aruba's interface is very cluttered, on Hetzner it's super clean. Night and day difference.

Oh and the specs are better for the same price, the password security is actually decent, and the servers are already up despite me not having paid for anything yet. That's incredible if you ask me.. they actually trust a new customer to pay the bills afterwards. How about you Aruba Cloud? Oh yeah.. too much to ask for right. Even the network isn't something you can trust a long-time customer of yours with.

So everything has been set up again now, and there are some things I would like to stress about hosting providers.

You don't own the hardware. While you do have root access, you don't have hardware access at all. Remember that therefore you can't store anything on it that you can't afford to lose, have stolen, or otherwise compromised. This is something I kept in mind when I made my servers. The edge nodes do nothing but reverse proxying the services from my LXC containers at home. Therefore the edge nodes could go down, while the worker nodes still kept running. All that was necessary was a new set of reverse proxies. On the other hand, if e.g. my Gitea server were to be hosted directly on those VPS's, losing that would've been devastating. All my configs, projects, mirrors and shit are hosted there.

Also remember that your hosting provider can terminate you at any time, for any reason. Server redundancy is not enough. If you can afford multiple redundant servers, get them at different hosting providers. I've looked at Aruba Cloud's Terms of Use and this is indeed something they were legally allowed to do. Any reason, any time, no notice. They covered all their bases. Make sure you do too, and hope that you'll never need it.

Oh, right - this is a rant - Aruba Cloud you are a bunch of assholes. Kindly take a 1Gbps DDoS attack up your ass in exchange for that termination without notice, will you?

HTTP/3 requires TLS. Wouldn't this make it drastically less economical to run a reverse-proxy? Are 4 unnecessary cryptographic operations per request not significant? What about the bandwidth overhead of rounding up the length of responses like `HTTP 200 OK\r\nContent-Length: 2\r\n\r\n{}` which make up a majority of all traffic to the nearest encrypted block?