When I built this site during a brief but decisive “hold my beer” moment, I didn’t expect quite this level of interest. I was wrong. This is rare, and has been independently verified by Mrs Wisener.

For a while now, the limiting factor hasn’t been ideas or data, it’s been server resources. Here’s why.

Some numbers (as of 20 December 2025)

Just a few light figures from the server:

• Database size: 87GB
• Total rows: 83 million
• Total data cells: 738 million

That may or may not sound like a lot. For an amateur coder, it’s… quite a lot.

It’s also quite a lot of data to chew through every time you ask a seemingly innocent question.

And these numbers are not static. They grow every month. It won’t be long before rows pass 100 million and cells tip over the 1 billion mark. At which point the database officially becomes self-aware.

To keep things usable (and fast), a lot happens behind the scenes. For example, directly querying Land Registry data to build charts can involve scanning ~30 million rows. If you waited for that live, you’d have time to make tea, drink it, forget why you made it, and question your life choices.

The reason it feels fast is because I run a small army of background cache warmers. They pre-compute the heavy lifting so the answers are already waiting when you ask. As the data grows, that background work needs more compute. Simple as that.

Cloud services at Hetzner

Up until now, I was using cloud services from Hetzner in Germany. They’re excellent, genuinely. The issue wasn’t quality, it was scale.

Costs went from a perfectly reasonable €45/month to around €115/month. Still good value. Just not great value for my “little” site.

The real bottleneck was RAM. I had 32GB. I needed at least 64GB. And let’s be honest, 128GB is looming in the medium-term future, preferably after I’ve emotionally recovered.

Dedicated services at Hetzner

So this week I removed the cloud stabilisers and went fully dedicated. No hand-holding, no safety net, just a box and a polite “good luck”.

The difference? Glad you asked.

With dedicated hosting, you get the whole server. All the resources. Exclusively yours. No noisy neighbours. No surprises.

The new server:

• Intel i5-12500
• 64GB RAM
• 2 × 512GB NVMe drives

Yes, I know — an i5. Cue raised eyebrows. This was a budget decision, and the i5-12500 gives excellent single-core speed, which matters more here than bragging rights. It does the job very well.

Cost:

€40/month.

Cheaper than cloud, by a significant margin.

I also set up new backups using Hetzner Object Storage for an extra €5.99/month. Still very reasonable, and far less stressful than hoping nothing goes wrong.

The short version

• The site is now running on a new dedicated server
• It’s faster, cheaper, and has room to grow
• I have spent several weeks quietly questioning how I ended up responsible for all this

Everything has been thoroughly tested and appears fine, but if you spot anything odd, please shout, I am human, despite rumours to the contrary.

Now that the infrastructure drama is (hopefully) over, I can get back to what I should have been doing all along:

actually working on the site and tackling the ever-growing list of updates.

No more server tinkering.

(Probably.)

Honestly, a really big thank you to Hetzner, amazing services and team.