New post: Now on three continents

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+title = "Now on three continents"
+description = "This website is now hosted on three continents"
+date = 2023-07-02
+[taxonomies]
+tags = ["website", "infrastructure"]
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+
+This website is now hosted on three continents.
+
+I recently changed the hosting for this site to [fly](http://fly.io), since I was rather intrigued by the idea of being able to run three small <abbr>VMs</abbr> (<dfn id="VMs">Virtual Machines</dfn>) worldwide for free. I would gladly have paid a small amount for their services. If they didn't have a free allowance for <abbr>VMs</abbr> then it would only be around $6 a month, so I'm not worried about them removing the free allowance.
+
+Previously it was running on one [Hetzner](https://www.hetzner.com) <abbr title="Virtual Machine">VM</abbr> in Nuremberg, Germany that I set up and maintained myself. The maintenance wasn't a problem for me, but rather the idea of slow loading times for anyone reading this outside of Europe.
+
+American visitors should notice a definite speedup now, as there's a server on the west coast and for the few visitors in the Asia-Pacific region, there's also a server in Australia. I kept track of the response time before and after the change using the [Online or not](https://onlineornot.com/) [Do I need a CDN?](https://onlineornot.com/do-i-need-a-cdn) tool, which you can see in the table below (measured in <abbr title="milliseconds">ms</abbr>)
+
+| Region                  | Before | After |
+|-------------------------|--------|-------|
+| Europe (Frankfurt)      | 62     | 32    |
+| US East (N. Virginia)   | 348    | 185   |
+| US West (N. California) | 503    | 61    |
+| Asia Pacific (Tokyo)    | 732    | 251   |
+| Asia Pacific (Sydney)   | 1114   | 76    |
+
+I do find it rather amusing that I spend more time tinkering with the site than actually posting anything, but, for once, tinkering has actually led to me posting something (this post). I would like to think that this might encourage me to post more in the future, but only time will tell.