rHXN

FediMeteo: A €4 FreeBSD VPS Became a Global Weather Service

https://it-notes.dragas.net/2025/02/26/fedimeteo-how-a-tiny-freebsd-vps-became-a-global-weather-service-for-thousands/
By: birdculture
HN Link
elcritch - 1day 47m ago
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!

YorickPeterse - 20h 44m ago
For Linux this will vary between distributions and configurations. For example, based on some testing I did today using mkosi [1] (for reasons unrelated to this discussion), a bare-bones Fedora 43 installation uses about 130 MiB of RAM, while a Debian installation uses a little more than 100 MiB.

IIRC last time I tried a bare-bones FreeBSD installation it used about the same amount of memory, maybe a little more based on how ZFS is set up.

[1]: https://github.com/systemd/mkosi

tiltowait - 20h 1m ago
ZFS will happilly (and intentionally) gobble up available RAM for ARC. On my 64GB system, ARC is using 42.4GB, but this memory is quickly reclaimable if it's needed. That said, I had very bad experiences trying to run ZFS on an underprovisioned system.
nicoburns - 3h 44m ago
FreeBSD may have less bloat, but I'm running a web server in a Linux container (debian-slim - so not even as small as you can go with linux) with only 256mb RAM (of which it is only using ~64mb).
andai - 9h 16m ago
I somehow remember Linux using half the resources it does today, 20 years ago. It occurs to me now for the first time, that this might be due to the switch to x64.

That's probably not the only reason but it bothers me that I never considered that before! I remember at some point it used twice as much RAM for basically the same thing, and I remember being bothered by that.

But I guess what you get in exchange for that is the ability to put in basically unlimited RAM.

bityard - 7h 16m ago
It's just the price of progress. When I started playing with Linux, a full fledged Linux desktop with web browser and all ran very happily on a machine with 16 megabytes of RAM. At the time, there were distributions that fit on a floppy disk.

Both are more or less impossible now, but I don't think we should think of 100mb of "background state" as bloated. The fact that your can get a lot of useful stuff done on Linux in under 512mb in 2026 while Windows and Mac need multiple GB just to get out of bed is pretty awesome.

johnisgood - 6h 21m ago
> have far less bloat than Linux distros and better latency

I think this has always been the norm from what I remember. That said, Arch Linux, KISS, Void, etc. are minimal enough, IMO.

RicoElectrico - 1day 45m ago
Unbloated distros exist, Alpine is one example. I was taken aback how snappy it is. Does everything without any undue delay. Merely logging in via SSH feels quicker as you don't have to wait a second for the prompt like on Ubuntu. apk is also super fast.
Imustaskforhelp - 1day 27m ago
Alpine is really good for servers.

Man I love alpine even though I don't use it so much but alpine does hold a special place in my heart for some reason (and i think the reasons are good)

Tinycore is another one which holds a special place in my heart, partially because its the most no BS simple alpine-like os that I have seen which is rather focused on the consumer side, so you can get GUI systems super quickly and minimalist.

The minimalist tinycore iso with gui and terminals ran on 21-40 MB :) let that sink in

They showed as 0.0% or 0.1% on my 8 gig computer.

I used tinycore to take my really old laptop which my brother used to game on mostly and was super dead, it was a dell mini pc with intel atom 1 gig of ram 32 bit, probably 10-15 years old

I ran tinycore on it with no problem and ended up with wifi access and then even ran modern firefox browser and ended up even running a website like https://pomodorokitty.com/ on it

Man,do i love them both.

I genuinely just wanted to create a service which could just boot tinycore gui servers in the browser perhaps via novnc for people to play with but I seriously wondered who might pay for the project

Oh btw oops forget that you can already do that by just downloading the iso of tinycore and then going to copy.sh/v86

In fact that inspired me to create the project but one of the issues of copy.sh/v86 is that its ephemeral and runs directly in your browser so if you close it whereas I thought of having a mini-server-like tinycore where I can get a gui mini server and can quickly open/close it with terminal and even heck modern browsers.

Everyone should try out tinycore just once imo. The simplicity of 21 MB is mind boggling to me. Makes one really wonder what bloat really is I suppose, definitely a fun experience.

Oh also I love alpine because I ran it in my phone using UserLand and I loved it although running python in alpine was a bit of mess on my phone and I think I ended up doing some wizard magic or something using g-compat in the end as well to run it. Although I think termux is pretty good and even better than UserLand in this context because UserLand runs emulated where Termux doesn't I guess but not sure.

timc3 - 5h 40m ago
Alpine used to leave performance on the table by default. Something to do with the compiler having a lot of safe options and not using some CPU extensions at the time.

Don’t know whether it is the case anymore, but it’s something I proved in the past and then engineering deployed minimal Debian instead because it ended up being cheaper.

jaypatelani - 19h 56m ago
If you liked tinycore check this one https://smolbsd.org/
yjftsjthsd-h - 16h 5m ago
Alpine is also pretty good as a desktop OS; I've got a desktop and laptop on Alpine, and another laptop on postmarketos (Alpine derivative).
Imustaskforhelp - 14h 32m ago
Interesting, I had looked at postmarketos but it was too bloated for me perhaps the last time I looked as compared to tinycore which was truly super minimalist

Like is there a way to get postmarketos with something like jwm or anything small perhaps? I would love to give alpine desktop a try, I think I did the disservice of not trying it enough then if you mention this

yjftsjthsd-h - 2h 35m ago
IMO the only reason to use postmarketos is if your hardware doesn't support normal Alpine. If you've got a normal x86 machine, just install Alpine, run setup-xorg-base, apk add jwm, maybe some minor setup I'm forgetting, and you're set.
elcritch - 1day 36m ago
True Alpine is pretty snappy. I don't like using it as muslc has given me headaches before. Arch is faster generally too but not as much. Maybe there's something with systemd stuff.
Imustaskforhelp - 1day 25m ago
One could probably use VoidLinux or Gentoo with glibc I suppose if one might want leaner than arch but more heavier than arch

Although VoidLinux's iso size I think is larger than ArchLinux or something which doesn't make that much sense but I don't really know but both are good references to check out.

realusername - 13h 49m ago
The BSD utils are always much nicer to read than the GNU ones when you want to understand what's going on, there's no competition.

I do prefer the GNU style licensing model & popularity but for the code itself, I prefer the BSD ones.

ErroneousBosh - 11h 48m ago
> retro BBS-like web app

You mean like oldschool dialup BBSes, or a forum-style "Bulletin Board"? If the latter, take a look at FlaskBB :-)

draga79 - 1day 46m ago
Thank you!
elcritch - 1day 33m ago
BTW, how do you feel about ActivityPub in general?
draga79 - 23h 50m ago
I like it. It's not perfect, but it's a good way to make sure that platforms will continue to be able to federate. They're evolving and things will improve. The experience is much better today, compared to some years ago.
sails - 14h 12m ago
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

https://surfrash.xyz/

nrhrjrjrjtntbt - 10h 4m ago
Nice. I think that site for any beach would be useful. Like how it is descriptions rather than a wall of data.

Request for manly, nsw, australia otherwise :)

sails - 7h 11m ago
Nice, does require some local knowledge to get it at all useful (if you can email me some info in what conditions work I can set one up for you.)

Is there a high res weather model for Aus? That makes a huge difference as well

nrhrjrjrjtntbt - 6h 44m ago
Thanks. I dont want to bother you as I assumed it would be just a case of pulling a feed but sounds like there is more. Plus I dont surf too often! I think they would have a high res weather model https://www.bom.gov.au/weather-and-climate/rain-radar-and-we... but not sure if it is.
sails - 4h 54m ago
Cool thanks, yes all good, yes there is basically a combo of knowledge dump and assembling raw weather data to apply the knowledge to, I haven’t done another location yet, but maybe wait for a few more requests :D
arjie - 14h 50m ago
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.

iamkonstantin - 12h 5m ago
> I wish I'd paid more attention to the *BSDs

Same! I've been trying to reduce complexities in my stack (e.g. Docker) and while systemd exists, I think the concept of "jails" or sandboxes is quite neat. I love tools that come with better out-of-the-box readiness.

DCKing - 11h 26m ago
systemd nowadays has a lot of sandboxing built in [0]! You can achieve jails using just systemd and no separate container manager.

[0]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd/Sandboxing

lexicality - 22h 16m ago
Lovely to see someone building something that doesn't require Kubernetes over 4 AWS AZs, DynamoDB, S3, Lambda etc etc.
tiffanyh - 21h 15m ago
IIRC, HN itself runs on modest hardware as well (just 4-cores, also FreeBSD).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28479595

ritcgab - 21h 6m ago
To be fair, that is 4 dedicated cores not shared with other tenants.
s4mbh4 - 7h 40m ago
> 2 package(s) x 4 core(s) x 2 hardware threads

Its not 4 , but 16 'cores' 2 packages = dual cpus on the same motherboard.

blain - 1day 1h ago
> 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

47282847 - 1day 1h ago
https://www.lowendbox.com/ is a popular source.
lbotos - 1day 44m ago
I came here to fight you but there are some low end boxes with lots of ram and disk for pretty cheap!

Found this as an example: https://lowendbox.com/blog/black-friday-bytehosting-is-here-...

Imustaskforhelp - 1day 17m ago
The bytehosting deal is good too! Oh btw lowendbox has a forum called lowendtalk where hosting providers etc. talk as well and show deals etc. and I got part of the community (you need to register and be verified manually but it wasn't hard)

Lowendbox is amazing. Glad we are talking about it as I recently joined it and the community's really supportive and honestly feels more so in the sharing spirit and I even talked about why people use lowendhosts etc. and got some pretty good answers imo

Although do be beware to stay away as there are some hosters which end up going completely down. So go with someone reputable as well and there is whole lore beneath in this forum :)

Racknerd,dedirock are usually recommended, I recommend https://serverdeals.cc/ etc. I have a list which I can recommend after being in the community for some time and here's some websites which I recommend for suggestions

https://serverdeals.cc/

https://vpspricetracker.com/

https://getdeploying.com/

Honestly I still recommend hetzner tho because these are some really really good deals but hetzner just has this reputation of more stability and I jsut have more faith in hetzner and its a "good enough" option imo and there are even some lowendhosts who kind of do share the fact that hetzner is very price competitive.

I personally had gotten a 2$/month 1TB vps hosting (yeah didn't really end up using it much aside from the shock factor/running yabs on it)

and also I got a 3 month 8bucks deal with netcup using their vouchers and everything to get 8 gigs of ram 4vcpus etc and honestly this was the best deal I ever saw but I will have to pay 5 bucks I guess after the 3 months end.

Most of it is remaining idle tho :< Are there any services I can run for the benefit of humanity (like running some self hosted services that can help anybody out there or smth?)

Let me know if you have any questions! I might be able to help you as I was active on lowendtalk till quite recently

p2detar - 8h 34m ago
I'm on Hetzner as well; migrated from DigitalOcean. They are stable, but they got a bit of bad reputation, since they were hacked at least 2 times already [0] [1]. Stable != Secure.

0 - https://www.heise.de/news/Hetzner-gehackt-Kundendaten-kopier...

1 - https://www.zdnet.com/article/hackers-breach-web-hosting-pro...

edit: links

numpad0 - 23h 32m ago
How did these came to existence? Most of these offerings look basically identical. Is it ran by the same guy behind, or is it like a get rich quick network business stuff?
IgorPartola - 22h 22m ago
Some of these are resellers. Big provider sells them a package of 10-1000 VPSs and they set up websites to sell them to you. But you can also find lots of direct deals as well. BuyVM famously has their $15/year deal on a 1GB VPS. You can also often find dedicated servers for like $25/month. I recently bought a $75 lifetime deal on some email hosting for up to 25 domains and I think 250GB storage. Great for some secondary domains and such that I use. There are some real gems out there and you should see their Black Friday threads. Kind of a wild place.
Imustaskforhelp - 21h 4m ago
There are lots of even cheaper deals than buyvm usually with racknerd and dedirock. Black friday deals are absolutely amazing but always go with someone a bit more reputed and Buyvm's an amazing choice too although they would be considered "pricey" in comparison to someone (just a few $'s) (I have joined their discord server)

I think racknerd recently did a 6.85$ or similar deal but the point of these deals become is that they become insanely overprovisioned and it becomes a showpiece of sorts "look what deal I got ;P" kinda not sure.

I think another fascinating deal about lowendtalk is that man those people have this faith in small hosting providers and giving chances to them etc. hoping that they become big as well. There are very few places like lowendtalk on the internet. I find a lot of similarities with the hackernews culture although more focused on deals/hosting although its definitely more casual than hackernews.

IgorPartola - 19h 17m ago
The weird thing is that it seems like some people are almost addicted to buying these boxes and I am not sure if the use cases. It almost has a feeling of gambling.

I used to get boxes from there for a specific product I had (ability to ping from multiple places around the globe to see what your latency was like) and one provider did burn me but the rest were pretty great.

I just wish more of them provided a proper native IPv6 stack. Still can’t understand why this isn’t standard for all.

Imustaskforhelp - 14h 35m ago
> The weird thing is that it seems like some people are almost addicted to buying these boxes and I am not sure if the use cases. It almost has a feeling of gambling.

Oh boy I had thought about this too. There are only quite a few uses of the completely cheap one. Perhaps for the chinese people, it acts as a VPN

Like I thought about the use cases and they were hard for me to find when you consider all the "free" stuff that's launched too. I think to me, some aspects of lowend are for the novelty factor (oh a 2$ 1TB server sign me up!) and what ends up happening is that I didn't really use the storage much so my opinion was nice whereas someone else who used it said that, it's a bad deal

You are right about this though, but still its just fascinating to find the deals and then like the fact is, they are still pretty small and you can just go talk to them and I think this customization and more discussion (hey does your product allow my usecase) etc. are some few reason

I once asked on the forum why they aren't using hetzner,upcloud etc. and someone replied with the fact that they want to make the small one win.

I don't think its completely gambling but you may end up buying something that you don't need much (I ended up with a netcup 8 gig server I guess) in a similar way. But now I kind of know that beating hetzner,ovh, (upcloud's more expensive) is possible perhaps but that if you want ton of servers fast and cheap, there is a possibility but I might still recommend companies like hetzner,ovh,upcloud etc. for any professional use, its just I would be thrown less under the bus as compared to if I have somebody idk set up in dedirock

One of the reasons why I stopped frequenting lowendtalk, might go next black friday perhaps but I don't even know, like there are tons of services now which can offer vm's cheap and fast and just similar to what you might buy from that. There are tons of these I use so I don't really know if buying cheap servers might make sense

One of the reasons I (liked?) the idea of buying cheap servers is that one can always scale when needed and they could then use something like these lowendproviders instead of vercel who initially might be free but then is super expensive. But I think that we are seeing some options which are free but not gonna be super expensive or that expensive perhaps.

The thing is, to me, its nice knowing a place like lowendtalk exists. I might go into its rabbit hole again or not I guess but I don't really know.

ksec - 19h 20m ago
LowEndBox is as old as HN and has been doing VPS deals before the cloud took over. There are also deals offering for VPN services as well.
toast0 - 22h 1m ago
There's some commercial software to sell/resell VPS, etc that some of these outfits use.

And it's pretty much a commodity business, so things are going to tend to look similar. If you're buying $5/month VPS, you don't want to pay for a lot of fluff. A lot of these are small time local hosters in a single location, but that's usually all you need for a small site.

Imustaskforhelp - 21h 7m ago
Its usually WHMCS + virtfusion

There are alternatives but usually all just go use these for some reason

This is also why a lot of these websites might look similar as well.

tn1 - 10h 34m ago
WHMCS is probably the easiest batteries-included tool for the job, giving billing, management, and a customer support portal. These could be unbundled or reinvented but for your average hosting company there's no point in doing so.
Imustaskforhelp - 22h 58m ago
To be honest there is one instance that i know of where what ends up happening is that colocrossing a major vps provider does end up doing something like this (they used to be hosters/owners???? of lowendtalk/lowendbox)

Now another aspect is that the hosting economy is very mutual, they all start out somewhere and they are usually friendly towards each other. Most Hosting providers start out by either using reseller service directly or by colocating or by reselling dedicated servers which can be themselves of other providers

I don't know but the community is both cut throat and chill at the same time. It's strange to point this phenomenon but I think my point of their friendliness is something which depends and I don't know much about it but I once asked people on lowendtalk if I wanted to create a cloud provider myself and I got some responses and they were friendly so I am basing it off of that

Another aspect is that the market has already raced to the bottom super hard. Hetzner/OVH are really cheap, so to get even cheaper, you kinda have to be in the same pricing range I guess

Fun or not so fun fact but do you know that there have been cases of lowendbox providers to actually go shut down because they take these completely no profitable sense deal and actually lose money sometimes. VeloxMedia is a recent example of that and there is still controversy surrounding it.

There is also the fact that the scam industry in this department works as such:

Rent a really big server with lots of cores for a few months

Sell them unreasonably in LET for the year pricing or more

Then sell the company/be unable to provide/etc.

these I think are called as deadpools in the community.

Also regarding your comment behind same guy, there are sometimes family relations between people

as an example, racknerd I think is owned by the stepson of the owner of colocrossing and they I think using colocrossing themselves.

These have their own little drama stories and I think this is just the tip of iceberg as I just joined recently and probably digging through old archives.

elxr - 21h 51m ago
Wow, this is amazing. Tempted to try one of their $2/month suggestions.
selcuka - 15h 28m ago
A random provider could be a hit-or-miss. I've personally used RackNerd (found them on LowEndBox/Talk) in the past and can't complain for the price. They have plans under $1/month, and they even provide an IPv4 address:

https://www.racknerd.com/BlackFriday/

No affiliation, just a happy customer.

znpy - 9h 35m ago
I had wildly varying experiences with companies i found on lowendbox.com

Some were fine, some offered a very good yearly plan but vanished after three weeks.

So yeah… people should keep that in mind.

Aurornis - 18h 5m ago
Be careful when comparing core counts across providers. Those ultra cheap providers are using servers that can be many generations old. They might also be heavily oversubscribed. 4 vCPU on one of the cheap providers could be slower than 2 vCPU or even 1 vCPU on a newer generation server. You really have to test or look at benchmarks.

If you have a RAM-constrained application where CPU and RAM speed are less of a priority, they can be great deals though.

draga79 - 1day 1h ago
this: https://www.netcup.com/de/server/vps/vps-500-g11s
riedel - 1day 25m ago
This one was slightly above 4 EUR (but without any minimum contract duration)

Here are actually the 4 EUR and below offers: https://www.netcup.com/de/server/guenstige-vserver-angebote

Funnily I on first sight could not find the same page in english.

sva_ - 17h 17m ago
Oracle Cloud gives you 4 oCPU (ARM), 24GB ram, 4Gb/s (10TB), 200GB NVMe SSD for free.

Although some people say it is difficult to get an instance nowadays. But it worked for me and I've been using it for more than 2 years now. Some say that free tier users sometimes get booted, that's why one should upgrade to a paid account.

LaurensBER - 10h 20m ago
The registration process is so cumbersome and annoying that I gave up. At that moment we were in contact with Oracle for a business contract at work, the horrible sign-up process, increasing CDS (Credit Default Swap) spread and risky AI investments made me decide to cancel the POC.

If your sign-up tier is so frustrating to use that you loss sales and you cannot fix it as a company, that doesn't inspire confidence in the rest of the infrastructure...

loloquwowndueo - 9h 40m ago
If your company is small enough that you don’t have a full procurement department to deal with all this, you’re of no interest to Oracle :)
vjerancrnjak - 9h 39m ago
I cant even register.
joecool1029 - 14h 38m ago
I have one for testing arm64 stuff on Gentoo. Worst signup I’ve ever had with a company.

Once I got account I could not spin up server until converting my account to paid. They’ve never charged a fee but they won’t let you use ‘always free’ instances in busy regions until you convert to a paid account.

giancarlostoro - 1day 1h ago
buyvm used to have one (not with those specs) for like $5 a year with 256 MB I used to love buying one or two of those for simple stuff.
Imustaskforhelp - 1day 14m ago
I am also of a similar belief but I recently found exe.dev on hackernews and I am kind of play-testing with it and the dev seems active on hackernews and on the discord so I am definitely giving it a go

Gullos Hosting which has 128 Mb server for 3.5$/yearly and also for $4.49 you can still get a 256mb server from C-servers and $5.50 from byteVirt.

But also, there is fact that one can probably just buy hetzner servers or upcloud servers or similar idk. I will probably try to get some free services and then transition to hetzner/upcloud/netcup when my project needs more scalability/is shown to be of valuable to the general public/interests regarding it.

Honestly I got a 8 gig netcup server for 5$ and so I got it out of their limited deals section but I am thinking of just holding it and probably gonna use it extremely because with the rising prices etc., I think its good enough too as well

I just love yapping about server prices and comparing them etc. I think I just love a good deal lol.

KomoD - 22h 26m ago
> Gullos Hosting which has 128 Mb server for 3.5$/yearly and also for $4.49 you can still get a 256mb server from C-servers and $5.50 from byteVirt.

I can't recommend Gullo's. I experienced near-constant network issues with my NAT VPS (in Poland, I think?), making it so unusable that I just let it idle until it expired. I should've spent the money on a 6 pack of beer instead, it is what it is.

awesome_dude - 1day 46m ago
> now is a 4 euro per month VPS in Milano, Italy - 4 shared cores, 8 GB RAM and 75GB disk space.

He didn't - he found a better specced one in Italy for that price

draga79 - 1day 44m ago
Exactly. Same price but better specs. The current provider is OVH and they recently started to host VMs in Italy.
Yeri - 1day 43m ago
there's €1 and €2 VPS too: https://www.strato.nl/server/vps-linux/ (not sure what the quality is but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
weiliddat - 22h 12m ago
IME strato is OK for cheap VPSes as long as you don’t have high expectations.

5-6 years ago, I remember trying to scale up to the 16/32GB tier was miserable and oversubscribed; moving to Hetzner at the same price point brought a huge performance boost (mostly on CPU and disk access speed).

weiliddat - 22h 10m ago
Don’t want to ding strato exclusively, likely the case for most $1-$4/month type hosting.

Not bad as long as you know what you’re getting yourself into.

Imustaskforhelp - 1day 4m ago
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.

fzeindl - 10h 56m ago
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.
babo - 1day 47m ago
"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?
draga79 - 1day 45m ago
It doesn't. You can Always translate the text in your favourite language. The project aims to send the forecasts to the users, so can't be multilingual. Anyway, that's the reason why there are the emojis. Those ones are international.
terespuwash - 1day 56m ago
Amazing project I understand why FediFollows helped it get more visibility https://social.growyourown.services/@FediFollows/11565141936...
draga79 - 1day 50m ago
Thank you!
ajoseps - 1day 1h ago
great write up and breakdown of the project. you can do a lot with a small VPS
draga79 - 1day 1h ago
thanks!
indigodaddy - 14h 17m ago
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.
xd1936 - 23h 16m ago
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!
FitchApps - 23h 28m ago
Such a cool project. Thanks for building it. Amazing what one can do with a tiny VPS.
isodev - 22h 47m ago
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!
iamkonstantin - 12h 3m ago
I like the idea that you can follow cities and they appear in the timeline. Also knowing it's all just markdown - let's just say it's refreshing to have things that don't endeavour to operate on hyperscale.
bix6 - 1day 59m ago
Awesome project! I’ve always dreamed of making my own weather service so this is a great inspiration.
draga79 - 1day 50m ago
Thanks!
dashzebra - 1day 1h ago
Ooh just what I needed, thanks!
draga79 - 1day 1h ago
thank you!
yoonwoosik12 - 19h 41m ago
[flagged]
sammy2255 - 19h 38m ago
Why did you write your comment with ChatGPT?
mdni007 - 19h 17m ago
@grok is this true?
nullpoint420 - 18h 41m ago
They had me until they hit me with their "It's not just poop; it's fart." writing style