The ZSF Foundation, the developer of the popular programming language Zig, recently announced that it will migrate the Ziglang.org website from Amazon AWS to Hetzner servers to save operating costs, because the increasing number of visits has led to the increasing cost of website hosting alone.
The ZSF Foundation once placed the website on the Amazon AWS cloud platform and used Amazon Cloud Front for access acceleration, but now it has to consider ordinary cloud servers because of the increasing traffic.
The ZFS Foundation spends approximately US$600 to US$800 per month on Amazon servers and CDN acceleration, which is also a considerable operating expense for the ZSF Foundation.
The ZSF Foundation operates entirely on user donations. When using Amazon, sometimes the platform will provide some cloud service credits for free, but the foundation does not like to beg from users or the industry, especially from Jeff Bezos (Amazon founder) and hissimilarBegging (note: original text).
The foundation prefers the idea of improving overall computing efficiency rather than passing the cost on to others, but the problem is that Ziglang.org is an essential service, which provides various Zig documentation.
In view of this, the ZSF Foundation rents a Hetzner cloud server for only 36 euros per month to host the website and tarball. Perhaps the increase in visits in the future may require the server to be upgraded to a machine costing 100-200 euros, but it should not exceed this price.
If the website is temporarily unavailable due to heavy traffic in the future, it will not be processed again. After all, too many people do not cache their CI operations correctly. Developers can continue to use mirror sites when the website is inaccessible.
The final cost savings will be used to pay contributors to the Zig project. The so-called spending money wisely, rather than giving money to Amazon, it is better to give it to contributors, which will make Zig better.