Brought to you by “The fresh food people”.

• Welcome to The fresh food people—our new, redesigned web infrastructure, ready to serve fresh Internet content for the years to come.
• The mystery behind X-The-Fresh-Food-People HTTP headers are now revealed—it's a better change you'll gonna see at Checkout.
• Our modern infrastructure now serves modern technologies, including HTTP/3, Zstd compression, and better caching support to bring you more value than your price.
• The fresh food people is available at Australia (Oceania/WOW), Indonesia (Asia/HRO), and Singapore (Asia/CST)—just like the OG supermarket chains since 2018-2022.
• …with future expansions coming to Malaysia (Asia/VIL), Philippines (Asia/RBS), South Korea (Asia/GSF), Switzerland (Europe/VLG), and United States (America/TFM).

Since mid-2024, we were hit by multiple IP address changes that impacted most of our websites and services. It is our very first shared hosting web server powered by Niagahoster (now acquired by Hostinger), that used to power our main website, reinhart1010.id, our shortlink service (e.g., share.reinhart1010.id), and more.

Their new AI-powered customer service chatbot became the new boss we have to defeat before specifically talking to human experts. And that's bad for us who already have a specific need in mind, for example, confirming whether the new IPv4 address has been confirmed between Hostinger's hPanel and cPanel; or getting a whole new IPv6 address because the older ones also do no longer work.

And since we depend on Cloudflare's DNS service, we have to manually change the IP addresses for each of our subdomains, including auto-generated subdomains that were provisioned by cPanel, such as webmail.share.reinhart1010.id, which we currently do not use.

There has been 4 (four) incidents of this between early 2024 to late 2025, and we do not want to spend any time again dealing with ever-changing IP addresses for our ever-growing list of website subdomains and domains. Thank God we are now more financially viable to rent a couple of VPS instead, and some knowledge to load-balance reinhart1010.id website with Cloudflare root certificates.

So, what if we could replace our first web server with a new, future-proof VPS cluster that works between regions and just fast? And that's the beginning of The fresh food people.

Why the name?

One upon a Unix timestamp, we jokingly planned a load-balanced cluster of individual VPS servers located in Australia, Indonesia, and Singapore. Then, we named it right after their grocery chains:

• for Australia, that would be Woolworths (Oceania/WOW)
• for Indonesia, that would be HERO Supermarket (Asia/HRO)
• for Singapore, that would be Cold Storage (Asia/CST)

The phrase The fresh food people seems familiar for some. And yeah, before the Cold Storage rebrand in mid-2022, and HERO Supermarket's demerger from DFI Retail Group (who owns Cold Storage) in late 2024, these three supermarket chains used to have the exact same slogan:

Did you get the load-balanced reference?

The joke blasted that some of our friends, including those currently working on these companies, forgot their own company's motto. "Is it 'Great value, hands down?'" I wish I could send some Coles trucks to the wrong grocers.

The fresh new commitment: Establishing great Digital Content Supermarkets.

Because they are planned to handle most of our web services (microsites, CMS, database, CI/CD, internal NTP, pseudo-CDN, etc.), we start to imagine each of our instance here as a typical supermarket with the constant need to provide:

• multiple product divisions representing distinct product categories (e.g., Deli, Health & Beauty), each have different ways to produce, store, and be taken care of for the best of the consumers.
• a centralized place for Checkout/Cashier and Customer Service on each branch.
• a centralized security system that detects thefts, frauds, and emergencies.
• a supply chain delivery system across branches to effectively provide and restock the products.
  

Now, compare them with our proposed:

• handle multiple types of content and input/output formats (e.g., HTML, JSON).
• a centralized place to handle incoming requests before rerouting to different sites/applications (this is indeed a reverse proxy).
• a centralized security system that detects forgery, DDoS, viruses on file uploads, etc.
• a decentralized system to coordinate content changes between different server instances that serve the same website.

Therefore, to run our "supermarkets" safely and efficiently, we are committed to run on these two basic principles of our service:

1. The Pareto (80/20) principle (related Wikipedia article). Remember that most of these "web services" are just either microsites or CMS, or anything else that deals with CRUD and access control. So, use approximately 20% of our overall server resources to host 80% of our web services.
2. Proxying is caring. Proxy at all costs. We're definitely in love with various third-party SaaS tools (like AWS S3, GitHub, Notion, Todoist) that help us manage our sites and projects effectively, but neither all of our consumers use, have an app or account for, legally eligible for, nor consent to have their interactions recorded on these third-party services (related YouTube video). Therefore, strive to reverse proxy content towards consumers for their own's legal, privacy, and ethical protections.
   

The fresh new tech stack.

The fresh food people will be powered by:

• Multiple S3-compatible object storage services. We are planning to combine Cloudflare R2 with Wasabi at the moment, so we can adjust the optimal storage costs across providers based on ours' and consumers' needs. Again, these resources will be proxied back to our consumers for safety.
• Caddy, the web and reverse proxy server. Unlike our legacy VPSes that use Nginx, we will attempt to use Caddy.
• Jenkins, for CI/CD, and Kubernetes, for coordinating Docker apps.  Unfortunately, both are currently not decentralized (a master node is required), so we plan to have another VPS instance to coordinate the work across our The fresh food people instances. Either a Cloudflare Tunnel or another VPS, Hypermart (Asia/HYP), might be required.
• Syncthing, for decentralized file config synchronization. Yes, we intend to use Syncthing to distribute Caddy config files between our individual instances. So when *that* Indonesian government try to mess up with our infra partners, like Cloudflare, in the future, it's not much a problem to us to keep our services running as usual.

Well, what is the difference between The fresh food people, our bespoke web server stack, with, let's say, only Kubernetes? We don't think everything should be yet another orchestrated Docker project, but if there are some, we'll continue to orchestrate it via Kubernetes.

Planned expansions.

We really hoped that our new tri-server architecture is enough to serve our needs at least until early 2027, because Reinhart will also continue focus on his study and future career, and that means server config efficiency is a must for efficient time management between the real world and the cyberspace.

But if we really need to scale a bit, we're considering expanding The fresh food people into more countries, including:

• for Malaysia, that would be Village Grocer (Asia/VGR). Although Giant seems viable (same parent company with Cold Storage), this one has been stocking Woolworths brand since 2022 (official website; The Star (Malaysia), 2022). Fyi, Coles is also supplying their products to Malaysia via another competitor, Jaya Grocer (Inside Retail (Australia), 2023).
• for Philippines, that would be Robinsons Supermarkets (Asia/RBS)—same Woolies reason (Minime Insights, 2021).
• for South Korea, that would be GS THE FRESH (Asia/GSF)—quite strategic to distribute our services to northern countries including Japan, South Korea, and Northern America.
• for Switzerland, that would be Volg (Europe/VLG). Just like Asia/GSF, that's frisch und fründlich.
• for United States, that would be The Fresh Market (America/TFM). Self-explanatory.

We're also looking for you, Delhaize. I mean, Food Lion, Mega Image, Super Indo, or everything in between. (>_ );