Migrating a 10-Year-Old Blog from Ubuntu 16.04 to FreeBSD Jails on Hetzner

A developer migrated a personal blog stack from a long-unsupported Ubuntu 16.04 Digital Ocean droplet to a Hetzner VPS running FreeBSD 14.3. The old server had survived 1,491 days of uptime serving static Hugo and nginx sites, but with the apt repository dead for five years, security exposure was the driving concern. The new Hetzner box delivers double the RAM and CPU and ten times the bandwidth for less than half the previous $13/month price.

The rebuild centers on FreeBSD Jails managed through Bastille, isolating each site in its own subsystem behind a Caddy reverse proxy. The author treats jails as disposable: if one is compromised, it gets destroyed and rebuilt. ZFS provides snapshot-based backups without paying the provider for the feature, and the integrated design is positioned as more mature than the Linux equivalents like Btrfs and Docker.

The piece doubles as a practical walkthrough — including the trick of installing FreeBSD on Hetzner via the hidden ISO mount option since BSD images aren’t offered directly — and as an argument that FreeBSD’s containerization story, predating Docker by two decades, is well-suited to small-scale self-hosting.