I've been experimenting with Ubicloud this morning as a new home for the Pagecord database. It's pretty neat – they support Hetzner (which is where the Pagecord app lives) and offer the usual benefits of managed databases, but for much less cost than the main cloud providers charge.

Unfortunately Ubicloud don't support Hetzner's Nuremberg data centre, only Falkenstein. I opted for Nuremberg a while back, so this means there's a bit more jiggery-pokery to migrate the app and the database to a new DC whereas it would have been simpler if the app was already in Falkenstein. There's a further complication with a number of blogs on custom domains because floating IPs in Hetzner are not transportable across DCs, so these customers will need to update their DNS to point to a new IP, or use the (far better) CNAME approach. That can be deferred though because I can configure the Nuremberg app instance to connect to the Falkenstein database. It just means these blogs will feel a little less snappy until the DNS gets switched over (I tested this today – most people probably wouldn't notice).

I'll probably do this in a couple of weeks. I'll announce it on the Pagecord blog beforehand (there will be a small 2-3 min outage) and also contact custom domain owners who will be affected. If anyone reading has used Ubicloud, I'd be interested to hear about your experience.