Every project on one 15 dollar server

what I built

Paused the collectors of passive projects, slimmed the nightly backup, moved databases, code and certificates from a second server, ran both servers in parallel for 48 hours and then deleted the old one.

Hetzner Cloud · PostgreSQL 16 · pgvector · nginx · certbot · systemd · Docker

what happened

• The expected hosting bill fell from 34.80 to 15.14 dollars a month.
• Active scheduled jobs fell from 98 to 27. The nightly dump shrank from 4.0 to 1.7 GB and 22 GB was freed.
• All 5 moved sites gave identical answers on the old and the new server before the switch.

what broke

• Two planned volume deletions were called off at the last check, because both volumes held live databases.
• Backup retention kept 4 days instead of 2 and filled the disk to 93 percent.

decision

Check the live state before deleting anything, and delete only after a parallel run.