Migrating from Ubuntu 16.04 to FreeBSD

Bruno Croci’s blog had been running on Ubuntu 16.04 for a long time, well past the Linux distribution’s expiration date. As such, it was time to upgrade, but instead of opting for something standard like another Ubuntu release, he opted for FreeBSD instead.

This blog has been running on a Digital Ocean VPS for over ten years. A machine hosted in New York City, running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. An LTS that hasn’t been in support for at least 5 years. It was about time to change it. After some considerations, I migrated to a Hetzner virtual machine that is way better than my old Ubuntu one, less than half the price of what I used to pay, and just across the country from me. Not only that, but I took the challenge to move my stack to FreeBSD. It’s a long text, but stay for a cool introduction of FreeBSD Jails with Bastille and some interesting site load benchmarks.

↫ Bruno Croci

I absolutely adore the recent surge in people (re)discovering the BSDs as a valid alternative to Linux in both the server and desktop space. In this particular case, it was FreeBSD’s Jails and ZFS support that won Corci over, and it’s easy to see why. While there are countless alternatives to Jails in the Linux world, ZFS is harder to come by as it can’t be part of the kernel due to licensing issues. With how powerful and capable ZFS is, it makes sense to want to use it on your server, and in that case, FreeBSD is probably a better choice than most Linux distributions.

There are countless reasons to choose one of the BSDs over a Linux distribution, and I’m glad we’re seeing an uptick.

source https://www.osnews.com/story/145056/migrating-from-ubuntu-16-04-to-freebsd/