New infrastructure for Pagecord

Pagecord originated in AWS London simply because I had a grand’s worth of free credits. Once they'd been gobbled up, I moved it over to Hetzner where I got better value and I didn't have to rely on the big tech leviathan. I’ve been really happy with how things have worked out, but I've just moved Pagecord to its third home in three years. I thought I'd write about why, and how, I did the move. Pagecord is still hosted by Hetzner, but it's now running in the Falkenstein data centre (DC). Why move? The move was driven by a migration to a new managed database (DB) system. Until now I’ve been managing Postgres myself, running it on the same server as the application. This might sound unusual in 2026, but this approach wasn't as cavalier as it might sound. It was pretty resilient because I had set up WAL replication to Cloudflare R2 to provide point-in-time backups, plus there was a tested restore process should the proverbial ever hit the fan. This DIY approach was very cost-effective and…