+++ title = "Now on three continents" description = "This website is now hosted on three continents" date = 2023-07-02 [taxonomies] tags = ["website", "infrastructure"] +++ 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.