- A FreeBSD migration replaced a ten-year-old Ubuntu 16.04 VPS that had been unsupported for five years.
- The FreeBSD migration cut hosting costs by more than half, moving from DigitalOcean at $13/month to Hetzner at under €6.
- FreeBSD Jails offer container-like isolation that predates Docker by decades, giving each site its own sandboxed environment.
- ZFS snapshots replace expensive provider backups, adding serious filesystem resilience without extra monthly fees.
Ten Years on Ubuntu 16.04 — and Then Reality Hit
When developer Antonio Croci decided to finally shut down his blog’s server, the uptime counter read 1,491 days. That’s over four years of continuous operation without a single reboot. Impressive, sure — but also a warning sign. The machine was still running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, a release that fell out of Canonical’s standard support window back in 2019. This FreeBSD migration story starts, like so many security incidents waiting to happen, with the quiet comfort of a server that just kept working.
Ubuntu 16.04 reached end-of-life in April 2021. After that point, the apt package repositories go dark — no more security patches, no more updates, no more fixes for whatever vulnerabilities surface next. The server was, by any reasonable measure, flying without instruments. Croci admits nothing bad ever happened, but he also acknowledges that’s partly luck. Anyone who’s managed WordPress sites for long enough has a horror story: his involves a blog quietly stuffed with hidden casino and gambling links after a compromised old VPS. That’s a mild outcome. Ransomware, credential theft, or being drafted into a botnet are the less amusing alternatives.
Running an unsupported OS on a public-facing server isn’t a niche problem. There are still thousands of Ubuntu 16.04 instances out there, many of them small personal or business sites where nobody’s watching the security bulletins. According to Canonical’s official release cycle documentation, standard LTS support runs for five years — meaning any installation still on 16.04 has been unpatched for years. This particular case is a useful reminder that “it still works” and “it’s still safe” are not the same sentence.
FreeBSD Migration: Why Not Just Upgrade to Ubuntu 24.04?
The obvious move would have been a straight upgrade — wipe the old Droplet, spin up a fresh Ubuntu 22.04 or 24.04 LTS instance, reinstall nginx, and call it done in an afternoon. Croci chose not to do that. His FreeBSD migration was partly driven by genuine curiosity — he’d been following BSD content for a while and wanted real-world experience with it — but there’s also a technical argument underneath that’s worth taking seriously.
FreeBSD occupies an interesting position in the server OS landscape. It’s not Linux. It shares no kernel lineage with Ubuntu, Debian, or any of the major distros. It’s descended from the original Berkeley Software Distribution Unix work, maintained today by the Source: https://crocidb.com/post/this-blog-ran-on-ubuntu-16-04-for-10-years-i-migrated-it-to-freebsd/
