Content and hosting update

I realize that new content has been relatively non-existent on this blog due to life and technical considerations. Life has been busy, occasionally fulfilling and oft times challenging, so much so that I’ve been neglecting the written word. On the other hand, my virtual life is somewhat active, whether that be in-game or in-Insta.

On the technical side of things, I’ve been deeply dissatisfied with my web host performance, so I’ve been tweaking things under the hood. I’ve moved away from Google Cloud for my web host VM since it just wasn’t priced competitively against AWS. I am sticking to Lightsail and their S3 storage service, and WordPress.com. Plus I’m dabbling in other services. Linode is my current favorite with their budget friendly yet robust Nanode plan. With a datacenter hosted out of Dallas, TX, I get speedy connections to my VM.

Winter indoors means nesting opportunities and more compute time. I hope to plan/execute home improvement projects and catch up on hobbies such as comic book collection, starting seeds and propagating new plants (big maybe this year), and cleaning up my online databases serving as backend to my social media content.

Year 2020 is just around the corner, and this is also a good time to reflect on new year resolutions. What lies ahead is a future full of opportunities and possibilities, but my foremost need is to keep oneself present and mindful to meet them. Learn, change, evolve.

Lose weight, get fit, eat healthy, expand knowledge. Spend more time with furdad and furkids. Get outdoors more often. Maybe smile more. Participate or volunteer outside my social circle. (That last one is scariest of all.)

Adventures in cloud hosting

Free hosting drama has brought my site postings to a virtual standstill in the last 6-8 months. It took me a long time to decide on a new home for my websites, which is why there haven’t been too many entries on subjects such as gardening or cooking.

But I think I’ve found at semi-permanent home at cloud hosts Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Both cloud services offered a free tier on which I could flex my Linux muscle and try self-hosting WordPress remotely.

After several weeks of experimentation and false starts (notably a Bitnami solution that was a headache to learn on top of all the other things I need to be familiar with), I can report that my sites are back up and running. At least temporarily. If administration doesn’t suck up too much of time, I hope to catch up on all the posts from the past year, which I will likely compress in weekly or monthly summaries.

Suffice it to say, my current hosting set up consists of Ubuntu 16.04 running Apache/PHP/MariaDB, with Webmin control panel for client administration. There’s obviously more under the hood, but these are the major aspects.

Let the blogging continue…or restart.