Teddy Hartanto

thoughts and experiments

Missing Phones and Moving to Hetzner

My parents are getting old. They sometimes forget where they place their belongings: wallets, debit cards, phones. Sometimes, their phones are actually somewhere out in the world. Other times, they just misplaced their phones somewhere inside the house. In either cases, we’re all panic-stricken.

This is where I come in. I’m the technophile. Let’s solve this using tech.

Not long ago, a friend told me about Life 360, a location sharing app. The idea is that I can install that app on my parents’ phones and keep track of their locations.

But, the issue is that it asks for phone numbers. I don’t like that. I went looking for alternatives and found two names in this space:

  1. Owntracks
  2. Traccar

Upon reading reviews, I’ve decided to try out Traccar.

Next, I need to host the Traccar server somewhere. Hosting it on the same server as the blog seems like a no-brainer. After all, who reads my blog? 😂🥹

Anyways, my blog was running on a 1vCPU 1GB memory DigitalOcean droplet with 25GB SSD. It costs me $6/mo. Here’s the resource utilization:

  • CPU is ~1-2% most of the time. Never crossed 10%.
  • Disk usage is 26%
  • Memory sits at ~75% though. A whopping 46% was used for MySQL server.

It’s obvious that the MySQL server need to go. But, even so, I’m not sure if the resources are enough for Traccar.

I found a good deal on Hetzner: 2vCPU, 2GB Mem, 40GB SSD at a price tag of $9.25/mo. It’s not an apple-to-apple comparison, but the cheapest 2vCPU 2GB Mem DigitalOcean droplet comes with a price tag of $18/mo. I compared the prices of both VPS providers in case I needed an upgrade. It seems to me that Hetzner is cheaper.

Price wasn’t the only reason I decided to migrate to Hetzner though:

  1. It was just nice that Hetzner expanded into Singapore this year
  2. I want to get a taste of Hetzner. DigitalOcean’s log in page takes a long time to load
  3. Migrating the systems would be a nice challenge during this lull period in my life. I need a challenge.

With all that, here’s the plan:

  1. Spin up a Hetzner VPS
  2. Migrate my blog from DO -> Hetzner
  3. Install Traccar

I wanted to also try out Coolify. Check out the intro video. But, let’s do things the hard way now. I want to learn more about nginx so instead of having Coolify abstract the nitty gritty details away, I’d like to dive deep into the technicalities.