Migrating Django apps to Hetzner
I was reading an article through Hackernews on migrations, and was reminded that I also recently moved my Django apps from several projects from Fly io to Hetzner. Even though I liked Fly io, I used their apps and managed postgres, I had some issues with it.
- Fly io's managed postgres isn't available multi region. One of my SaaS apps went down because the postgres in a region went down. I couldn't do anything. I could host postgres myself on a Fly io server, but for that price it's pretty steep.
- I had connectivity issues for a full day in the Amsterdam region and they didn't report on it. When asked in the community forum they confirmed the issue. Some users had a bad experience on my app.
That's when I decided to move things to Hetzner and use Dokploy. Dokploy is an open-source tool that simplifies deployment and management of applications and databases. It allowed me to setup multiple applications on one server easily, while serving multiple domains from that server.
Since the migration, costs have gone down dramatically while speed has improved dramatically as well. I learned that splitting a database and application for Django into two services complicated things a lot. Now I have a database and application running on one server and it works way better. Some requests even went from seconds to milliseconds. I also feel much more in control.