For the first time ever on hartr.net, cloud migration has resulted in a significant savings on AWS costs, which have been mitigated 90%. Migrating from Amazon towards DigitalOcean has also resulted in a 33% reduction in compute costs, which is terrific news for everybody who likes to read or write these articles.
In terms how how I would use this experience as a recommendation for new AWS users, my best advice would be to keep compute costs lower by not even using t2.micro instances. While they claim to be free for a certain number of hours per month, I found that after a year of hosting Amazon will start to charge.
Does DigitalOcean do this as well? Of course they do. I wouldn’t be surprised if they make up for cheaper compute by charging higher prices on some other end. But the nice thing about migrating to open-source is that it plugs into everything. Even Microsoft has an Ubuntu plane in Windows 10 now. I found it to be much more useful than PuTTy because it abstracted away the clunky UI and Windows file interface.
The freedom of the various apps that work on this platform has also been a serious enabler towards building up this brand presence. While I have done so on previous iterations of this site, I gotta give thanks to all the hard workers on the Linux project, as well as the proud souls that continue to develop Debian in particular. And while a trained eye will be able to easily tell what my site provider runs on, I’m not going to make it exceptionally easy for you. Just know that I paid nothing for it.
I’d like to continue preaching if only for a moment and remind everybody that these folks work tirelessly and for no money to keep more (much more) than half our internet structure running. Lots of people find a way to make money off it; I’ve worked for them in the past. They’re doing god’s work to make sure our systems continue to function. So far, mine have.
One last recommendation I would make is to never utilize physical or Windows infrastructure. Ever. It possesses a pecuniary price and a learning curve and requires an in-place infrastructure that only grows in cost. If you need it for accounting purposes, then it’s a necessary evil. But unless it’s for practical infrastructure purposes akin to those, hartr.net will never utilize those principles.
Well, ok. I run a windows vm in parallels to play Magic Arena. But I swear, that’s it!
Stay safe and sane in these trying times. If there’s anything I can offer you, please contact me directly.