So, not exactly bye mattiesworld, but rather bye mattiesworld.gotdns.org 😉
In 2005 I started this blog and registered the domain name mattiesworld.gotdns.org . See the screenshot above for a flashback. Apparently 20 years ago, it was also a hot summer 😉
Back then, DynDns (later Dyn Inc.) was a reputable company and I already used it a lot for dynamic ip hostnames. Not to mention, it was free. They also had a bunch of domain names for which you could bind a static ip to a subdomain. And so, mattiesworld.gotdns.org was born. Before the blog, there was the static website at Telenet, which I still have a copy of to this day. It’s quite embarassing though (yes, even more than this blog).
In 2014, things were going not so well for Dyn, so they started asking money. I thought, fair enough, I have been enjoying the free service for all this time now. It started at 19 bucks, which was okay-ish. The next year it bumped to 30 USD, to which I frowned upon. They did throw in some extra services to sweeten the deal, although I didn’t use them. There was another bump to 40 USD and suddenly there was the announced that they got acquired by Oracle. I knew it was the end of an era and needed to find an alternative. Indeed, after the acquisition, price rose to 55 USD! They expanded the plan with more subdomain names, but who cares about 50 subdomains lol. The price hike was so big, that the price didn’t even budge when corona inflation hit the world.
It took me 10 years to quit Oracle. 7 years ago already, I bought shibby.be with the idea of migrating the domain.
Last weekend, I noticed my shared hosting at DreamHost was about to renew. I had been comtemplating to move after 7 years: it had also become expensive for what it was and very limiting. On top of that, a few years ago, Belgian tax law also reached America, so + 21%. Lately there were top deals to be had with Hetzner’s cloud VPSes until they doubled the prices and more. It took quite a bit of research, but finally found and settled on quicksrv.io . They have servers in UK and The Netherlands. In UK they have the Ryzen 9 9950X for higher single core performance. In The Netherlands, they have the EPYC 9354P for multicore server loads, higher uplink and bigger disk. For 8 EUR you already have a Ryzen with 8GB ram and 150GB nvme disk. Quite a good deal, when checking back at their site now, I wasn’t surprised to find out they’re temporarily sold out on the Ryzens.
I think they must be quite a new company since they were still setting up their payment integration when I first made an account. Last week I could confirm they integrated the well-known Mollie for easy integration with multiple providers. API and Crypto payment is also available. The panel looks a bit vibe coded, but all in all it works and the VPS itself is eventually what counts. No complaints so far. If you’re interested, please use my referral link and get 50% discount on your first month.
So when I changed hosting, I thought it was a good time to also migrate the hostname. Which is also easier when you’re in full control 😉
So goodbye mattiesworld, welcome mattiesworld!