Series: Part 1: choosing and creating the server · Part 2: hardening and configuring it · Part 3: migrating data and cutting over

I recently moved a small production API from one VPS provider to Hetzner Cloud.

The stack is ordinary: a Rust web server, PostgreSQL, Valkey (the open-source

Redis fork), and Caddy as the TLS-terminating reverse proxy, all under Docker

Compose. Encrypted blobs live in S3-compatible object storage, which doesn't

move at all.

These posts are both the record of what I did and a tutorial. Each step comes

with the command , what it does , and why it works that way , because

most migration guides give the commands and skip the reasons, and the reasons

are what you need when something goes wrong.…