2018-03-22
Sailing through the clouds
In the two decades that i have been doing things on the internet, i have used many web hosts such as FortuneCity, Schlund+Partner, Strato, and 1und1. They were all good at the time i went to them to host my projects. They made my time easier by not having to worry about the technology behind the server. But eventually the performance was no longer adequate, and i had to move on. As you know, i downsized my webspace at the beginning of this year. But apparently, the Friedersdorf based web hosting service ALL-INKL can't handle my traffic and load at that price point, which is why i went to Amazon AWS and created a Lightsail instance for less money, but more performance.
Since i already had experience with running a Apache web server on Linux-based Debian and a headless Raspberry Pi, it was simple to set everything else up. After some hiccups with Ubuntu and an old LAMP stack, i got it all working. On the surface, it looks like nothing happened, but behind the scenes i changed many parts to make it appear like that. For example, i had to set up Cloudflare as DNS and Mailgun as MX record for some of my domain names, to make them keep pointing to the right direction. I also removed the logging of IP addresses to comply with GDPR.
Many years ago, i built and run a blog hosting service for a long time, among other things, like embeddable chat widgets. All written in Perl, from the very bottom, and without any framework. I learned a lot, during and after it. I became quite good in handling file-based databases, even with thousands of hits per hour, because of the techniques i developed to prevent too much load on the server. Later, i installed WordPress for publishing my own posts, instead of writing my own code in Perl. Because why reinventing the wheel, if no one cares anyway?
But i was never a PHP and MySQL person, because of the many external dependencies, which is why i now took the opportunity to write a "flat-file based blog" from scratch, just in case if i ever need to move somewhere else again, so i don't need to fumble around with things i don't enjoy, or don't have time for. FYI, the rooms in our rented apartment have on average three clocks, in almost every direction at least one, because my dad likes it. All pages here are now static HTML files, which were generated by a dynamic Perl script i wrote.