Tag: website

For many years my website and blog have been hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), but recently things have changed.

My Hosting History

I started life on a shared hosting platform and after a few years I got an email saying they were kicking me off because I had too much traffic. They were cheap and were expecting most of their websites to get no traffic, and so they charged very little. When they noticed how active my website had become they shut me down.

I moved to another hosting company that claimed unlimited traffic. After a while I got kicked off by them as well. They meant it was unlimited traffic as long as you had no traffic. 🙂

That time I moved to a dedicated physical host. This was expensive and worked pretty well for a few years, but eventually the hardware was going out of support, so I was forced to rebuild. Rather than rebuild on physical kit I chose to try hosting the website in the cloud. At that point the only real choice was AWS. Azure and Oracle Cloud existed, but AWS felt like a safer option, so I chose that route.

AWS was a lot more expensive per unit of resource (CPU/RAM) than a physical host, but because it was elastic, I was able to provision everything very small, knowing that it could easily expand if I needed extra resources. With the physical host I had to buy enough headroom in advance to allow for potential growth. So I ended up paying about the same on AWS as I did for the physical host, but technically I had a lot less resource on AWS. That was fine. It was an experiment. 🙂

I can’t remember exactly when I switched to AWS, but in a blog post from February 2016 I mentioned I was planning to try it. So I guess that was over 8 years ago.

Why move now?

My AWS compute instance was running Oracle Linux 7 (OL7), which switches to extended support in December, so I had to do something.

In my real job I’ve been pushing hard to get our servers migrated from OL7 to OL8 or OL9, depending on vendor support, so I was fully aware it needed to be done.

Why OCI?

Despite being so single minded at work, for my website I was kind-of paralysed by choices. Do I switch cloud providers? Do I try a different Linux distribution? Do I change the tech stack? I literally spent months in denial, unable to make a decision. Then I just snapped and decided it was OL9 on OCI, and I would continue with the LAMP stack. It ended up being such a quick decision, that I was amazed I had spent so many months fretting.

I’m sure Oracle would like me to say I chose Oracle Cloud because it’s the best, but I really did it on a whim. Time will tell if it was a good choice. 🙂

What did I do?

A few weeks ago I started putting together some Terraform to build the kit I wanted. It was mostly just variations of the Terraform articles I’ve written before. I noticed a few things have changed since those articles were first written, so I had to do some updates to some of them.

With the kit built I was planning to do the configuration using Ansible, but I quickly decided it was a bit pointless. I do this so infrequently that it really doesn’t make sense to invest the time to make a perfect build solution. Instead I just wrote some shell scripts to do everything I needed. Cheap and cheerful.

I had documented my AWS build from 8 years ago, so some of the VM config could be repurposed for this. There were some changes because of the move to OL9, but it was close enough to give me a head start.

A few days ago I did the final transfer of the files and database contents, pointed the DNS to the new location and it was all done.

I waited a few days then started to remove everything from AWS.

Cost?

I really don’t have a clue at this point. One nice thing is some of the components are covered by the Always Free license, but that’s mostly for the cheap bits. The most expensive bit is the compute, and what I’m using is not part of the free tier.

It’s possible I could leverage a couple more of the free tier components to make things cheaper, but I guess my willingness to do that will depend on what the bills look like after the first couple of months. Maybe there will be a phase 2. 🙂

Thoughts

I’ve been playing with Oracle Cloud and OCI for a few years now, so there wasn’t a learning curve to worry about. I think doing the rebuild on AWS or Oracle Cloud would have involved a similar level of effort, because of my past experience of both.

There is a big sense of relief that I’ve got this done before the OL7 deadline, but what happens next really depends on how I feel over the next few weeks, and what the bills look like.

Having the rebuild fresh in my mind and with new documentation of the process, it would be very easy to switch back to AWS, or have a go at moving to Azure. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…