Today marks the beginning of a new era for my online presence. For years, I’ve self-hosted everything and paid for “enterprise-tier” internet services at home. This worked for many years, but as work and school have picked up, I have really lacked the time to maintain everything involved in keeping it running.
Without going into too much detail about everything involved, my new domain is now hosted on an EC2 instance in the cloud that’s actually free right now because I’m a student. It’s a 4-core cloud instance with 16GB of memory - plenty for all the mucking about I want to do (even minecraft server hosting for plugin development!). Also instead of using WordPress and all the bloat involved with a MySQL databse, I’m using a super lightweight flat file blog powered by Jekyll. I’ve designed the theme 100% myself (perhaps obviously).
I’m still working on spiffing all that up and perhaps I’ll migrate over all my old WordPress posts (apparently it’s possible), but otherwise I’m pretty happy with everything so far. This really seems sustainable!