You Rename My Lake — I Move My Hosting

~/posts / you-rename-my-lake-i-move-my-hostingby Olaf Alders · August 31, 2026 ·2 min read ·424 wordsPhoto by the author.You rename my lake — I move my hosting. OK, so the sequence of events is slightly out of order, but the motivation is similar. Last week I moved PrettyGoodPing from DigitalOcean in the U.S. to Hetzner in the E.U. Price was a factor, but not the only one.To be honest, if I now have to check the provenance of my produce, I should probably do the same for my hosting bill. It’s already taking forever to buy raspberries, so in for a penny…As far as the lake thing goes, it’s too ridiculous for me to spend time on when John Gruber has already done a magnificent job of summing up the issues:Daring Fireball: Trump renames Lake OntarioDaring Fireball: Golfo del Gringo Loco (DF archive)Daring Fireball: Matt Walsh on Lake OntarioDaring Fireball: Making a Hames Out of ItI would like to add, however, that the whole Gulf of Mexico thing is equally lame and I’ve thought that since it happened. Hell, I had a similar opinion about Freedom Fries, which is possibly part of what set this all in motion.On a related note, we’ve been working on a similar move for MetaCPAN for some time now, and I’m hoping we can do the final cutover soon (for some definition of soon). We get no sponsorship from DigitalOcean, so we are not tied to this service.The breathtaking speed with which Google Maps happily gets on board with this lunacy has been a good motivating factor for me to de-Google myself as well. Untangling myself is a non-trivial, longer-term process. I’ve mostly settled on trying not to tie my Gmail account to things that matter and trying to use it less rather than more. I’m not going to make it my full-time job to get FAANG out of my life, but I do try to be mindful of how deeply I’m letting the infiltration go.You can log in to PrettyGoodPing with Google (as you can for My Mind is Racing) but for the latter I’ve added email login as well, so you at least have a choice and a fallback if/when you lose access to Gmail.And yes, I am aware that me taking my business elsewhere does essentially nothing to the US economy, but it does make me feel better not to be feeding the beast quite as much as I used to. If you lived in a really nice apartment over a meth lab, would you buy your groceries there?