Contabo is cheap for reasons

TLDR: In December 2023 I picked this low-cost VPS provider. I do not recommend them, and I hope this writing will save people from wasting any time or money on Contabo.

They claimed "German Quality, Always". It's neither good quality, neither always.

For the most part, from December 2023 to September 2024, I could almost live without caring too much about managing my server, whose setup is mostly delegated to Cloudron. And I had no problem using Cloudron for my web apps on this cheap VPS; my Cloudron backups were also configured in Cloudron to use Contabo Object Storage. No problem on the surface. Until Murphy's law enter the game:

  • An outage in September 2024 broke availability in Nuremberg Data center and so my backups and my Cloudron instance were unavailable. I entered panic mode because there was nothing I could see or do. Contabo offered no support because their customer portal was impacted as well and no fail-over mechanism had been put in place. That tells a lot. Fortunately this was solved after a few days.
  • Quickly after this outage resolution, I noticed too that rclone and Cloudron backups were acting weird, mostly due to the slowness or rate limiting of Contabo Object storage API. I couldn't find an explanation so I just contacted Contabo support, which fixed my problem without saying much, sadly.
  • Few weeks later still in September 2024, my DNS config on my VPS starts to cause issues, but only to the light of problems encountered in WordPress, Miniflux and Changedetection. All those issues exploded to my face in the form of timeouts or unreachable URLs. Fortunately I found this write up https://www.thomasmartens.eu/contabo-dns-lookup-timeouts/ and could just fix my default NetPlan configuration and switched from Contabo DNS to 1.1.1.1 (CloudFlare) and 9.9.9.9 (Quad9).
  • I noticed too that my object storage space was filling up constantly, causing me some anxiety. And I couldn't clean anything. The backup cleanups were also silently frequently in Cloudron as a result. In the end I couldn't find the root cause but switching to Hetzner storage instead of Contabo Object Storage fixed and made the whole process faster.

Unfortunately I went through those issues. But I could have avoided them. When one have to pick a product or service, it's better to do more research and ask around for advice.

Use ChatGPT to be brutally honest when giving you advice and saving you money and pain.

Or just visit forums and communities like Reddit;

Lessons learned

  • Some products and services are cheap for reasons: quality for free is often a scam.
  • I should have checked internet before. Be more picky, check the community forums and reviews. Avoid unneeded pain.
  • Do not put all your eggs in the same basket, i.e pick different locations and providers for your compute and data.
  • Monitor the health of your backups and storage location.
  • Plan for disaster.

Conclusion and what's next

I still have my main VPS at Contabo, however my storage and backups are with Hetzner, migrating to Hetzner should be a no brainer, thanks to the built-in quality of Cloudron.

I've also configured another VPS with Hetzner, with satisfaction, for running Gitea Actions, because there is no way I rely on GitHub.

So you know. Move away from them, unless for cheap, non business critical workflows where performance and reliability are not a concern.

Markdown: a text adventure

Seriously I wonder what is wrong with us, computer scientists and computer hobbyists. I thought I loved markdown, that I needed to keep telling the world about it, but what renders in Gitea is not rendering the same in GitHub, nor in Obsidian. I'm likely idiot, let's find out.

The guide at https://www.markdownguide.org/book/ already starts by confusing its readers, looking for simplicity, with prompting the user to pick between normal or extended syntax. The top menu also mentions hacks and tools and books. Woot ? Aren't we talking about a simple text format and about making things simpler ?

This can't be so complicated, at least I thought. Then I visited https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown#Implementations and fallen of my chair -- note the >dramatic< tone here, but I'm only sitting in my sofa and avoiding sleep, I'm all fine.

I hope we are solving this problem. Likely, the smart people figured it out... < o> < o> https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=variant+markdown&sort=byDate&type=comment. Woot.

Damn, even on Markdown supposed to provide a simple and better source format and publishing tool than HTML, we experts can't agree. Myriad of tools and implementations each extended by a few more artisanal tools here and there, millions of hours wasted ?

They are plenty static site generators and people crafting them and enriching markdown with details to hopefully generate, well, mostly valid HTML ? Or not ? Last time I checked, only an handful of those would take care of this goal.

We could chose to go back to working with text or HTML without tools in our way. This blog post for instance is almost just text and links, nothing much I require from markdown. This likely makes this portable. No transpiling needed, no tools.

It's NOT SO HARD and still readable. This blog post also has links that do not require remembering keyboard shortcuts on Mac for [Title](...) nor combining any special key.

Markdown is like sharing a recipe, but everyone reinvents a different complicated meal.

Simple is however better.

Instagram

As a reminder of how shitty those social media can be, I'm feeling obligated to write this short rant.

This morning, using my secondary empty and idle Instagram account to do some research, I end up discovering a nice content through the home page feed, and I'm trying to share it with my partner.

For some reason, the share does not reach my partner, so I want to find the content again and I navigate backward and this triggers a home feed refresh. My home feed is now completely unrecognizable and this causes immense frustration.

Last week, I was about to revive my main Instagram account, and this kind of bad UX reminds me that the benefits are not worth the immense frustration and non-sense of navigating an endless loop of evaporating content. No, Meta, you won't fool me again.

Fear of missing out ? not worth it.

Default settings for watches in Changedetection

I'm addicted to Changedetection for spying on website changes and internet search results for specific keywords, Occasionally also for monitoring price changes. It's quite handy to discover new links added to web directories, or stay updated with some websites that do not provide any RSS feed.

Context

  • I'm watching hundred of URLs.
  • I often spy on webrings and blogrolls to discover new interesting links, and also on search engines results for specific keywords.
  • I'm self-hosting Changedetection through Cloudron.
  • I'm mostly following through those watches via my RSS Reader, Miniflux.
  • For some specific changes, like weather bad conditions, I subscribe via ntfy.

Anyway, I've developed a few habits that fit my workflow so well for every new watch, which are:

Settings > General

This is where we set defaults for all future watches, it's pretty obvious you must start here. Here is my current setting:

  • Time between check: By forcing a convenient interval between checks, you try to find a balance between information overload and staying current. Pick your poison, but don't hesitate to override this setting at per-watch level.
  • Extract from document and use as watch title: it's convenient to let Changedetection take care of naming your watches based on the webpage titles rather than leaving the sometimes very long and non human-friendly URL as a default description.
  • Random jitter: this is handy to avoid stressing your I/O too much.

General > Group tag

This one is mostly for better organizing stuff, as I mentioned I follow those changes through RSS, I noticed it was harder to distinct between important and less important stuff because I was following the default RSS feed, but Changedetection provides distinct RSS feeds per groups/tabs of watches, and that's my preferred workflow now.

I'm trying to always set a label, I have around 15 in total, some for specific interests (privacy, discovery aka list of links, devops, music, ...) or specific people, locations and business updates. The rest is generally less important and is labelled with things like FOMO, misc, ...

Example of group tag.

Those group tags appear as labels next to the URLs you are watching.

Example of labelled URLs.

If you want to watch a whole group through RSS, link is at the bottom right of the page on the group tab.

Filters & Triggers > Remove elements

It's common on bloated rich web pages to want to focus on specific parts, like everything between <header> and <footer> sections, so I sometimes have to add footer and header. It's mostly needed for sites like eBay, 2ememain, where we can buy and sell things.

Remove HTML elements.

Filters & Triggers > default filter and triggers

my Text filtering defaults in Changedetection.

This is purely for spam reduction as I mostly want to know when something new is made.

Sometimes I also enable Sort text alphabetically depending how the page is updated by its author.

🆕 Those new settings have been added recently and I'm also enabling them on new watches:

Extension

Try the web browser extension for Chromium based browsers, it makes watches one-click away.

Next

I've opened a discussion in Changedetection's repository to talk about how repetitive it feels to me, in the hope we can see something like template settings be proposed in the future, at least for the filters & triggers which I consider is not too hard to start with.

Minifux scraper rules

I'm following Joy of Tech comic via RSS in Miniflux but the image was never loading.

I found half a solution on this blog post of Jan-Lukas Else, unfortunately the proposed solution fails probably as a consequence of some changes in the format of Joy of Tech pages.

The fix is quite simple actually. Edit the feed settings, set the scraper rules to the following:

p.Maintext > img[src$=".png"]

And of course enable "Fetch original content" in the feed options.

And voilà, simple and beautiful.