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 • 7 months ago

395 89 7 months ago

it-notes.dragas.net

dashzebra• 7 months ago

Ooh just what I needed, thanks!

draga799• 7 months ago

thank you!

ajoseps• 7 months ago

great write up and breakdown of the project. you can do a lot with a small VPS

draga799• 7 months ago

thanks!

blain• 7 months 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

draga799• 7 months ago

this: https://www.netcup.com/de/server/vps/vps-500-g11s

riedel• 7 months 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.

47282847• 7 months ago

https://www.lowendbox.com/ is a popular source.

lbotos• 7 months 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-...

elxr• 7 months ago

Wow, this is amazing. Tempted to try one of their $2/month suggestions.

znpy• 7 months 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.

giancarlostoro• 7 months 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.

Imustaskforhelp10• 7 months 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.

awesome_dude• 7 months 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

draga799• 7 months ago

Exactly. Same price but better specs. The current provider is OVH and they recently started to host VMs in Italy.

Yeri• 7 months ago

there's €1 and €2 VPS too: https://www.strato.nl/server/vps-linux/ (not sure what the quality is but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

weiliddat2• 7 months 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).

Aurornis• 7 months 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.

sva_• 7 months 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.

joecool1029• 7 months 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.

LaurensBER• 7 months 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...

bix6• 7 months ago

Awesome project! I’ve always dreamed of making my own weather service so this is a great inspiration.

draga799• 7 months ago

Thanks!

terespuwash• 7 months ago

Amazing project I understand why FediFollows helped it get more visibility https://social.growyourown.services/@FediFollows/11565141936...

draga799• 7 months ago

Thank you!

elcritch3• 7 months 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!

draga799• 7 months ago

Thank you!

elcritch3• 7 months ago

BTW, how do you feel about ActivityPub in general?

RicoElectrico• 7 months 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.

elcritch3• 7 months 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.

Imustaskforhelp10• 7 months 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.

bingo-bongo• 7 months ago

Try “UsePAM no” and ensure “UseDNS no” in sshd_config on Ubuntu and you’ll probably experience the same fast login time.

YorickPeterse• 7 months 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• 7 months 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.

realusername• 7 months 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• 7 months 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 :-)

andai2• 7 months 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• 7 months 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• 7 months 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.

nicoburns• 7 months 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).

babo• 7 months 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?

draga799• 7 months 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.

Imustaskforhelp10• 7 months 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.

FitchApps• 7 months ago

Such a cool project. Thanks for building it. Amazing what one can do with a tiny VPS.

xd1936• 7 months 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!

isodev• 7 months 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!

iamkonstantin2• 7 months 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.

lexicality• 7 months ago

Lovely to see someone building something that doesn't require Kubernetes over 4 AWS AZs, DynamoDB, S3, Lambda etc etc.

tiffanyh• 7 months ago

IIRC, HN itself runs on modest hardware as well (just 4-cores, also FreeBSD).

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

ritcgab• 7 months ago

To be fair, that is 4 dedicated cores not shared with other tenants.

s4mbh4• 7 months 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.

arjie• 7 months 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.

iamkonstantin2• 7 months 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• 7 months 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

indigodaddy2• 7 months 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.

indigodaddy2• 7 months ago

Got it done (well via GPT5.2/Perplexity Pro), single html file:

https://jgbrwn.neocities.org/weather/

sails3• 7 months 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/

nrhrjrjrjtntbt2• 7 months 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 :)

sails3• 7 months 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

fzeindl• 7 months 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.

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

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