Digital Ocean basically lets you run something called a droplet in the cloud. It’s a general purpose server more or less. Put nginx on it, start the server process, configure the DNS rules, and congrats you have a site that says hello world.

A droplet is similar to an EC2 on Amazon Web Services. I found DOCN to be cheaper than AWS when I hosted my site there. I was going to also suggest proton and DOCN might work for your use case. You get the redundancy and uptime without needing to use your own hardware, electricity, or bandwidth.

Fuck reddit.

Feeding user data to an LLM. Jacking up API costs. Being generally unusable on mobile. Usurping old.reddit.com to try and force me to the official app on “unmoderated” and NSFW threads.

Now with their IPO and a need to deliver ever increasing subscriber numbers and improved metrics for shareholders every quarter, the writing is on the wall.

I hope it goes to zero. The only sad thing is all the knowledge that will be lost due to the sky high API pricing when the site eventually does sunset. I’m guilty myself of trying to de-enshittify google somewhat by adding reddit to just about every search. Hopefully people smarter than me have ways to archive that info.