February, 18, 2024 archives

I have been working on shutting down some of the (virtual) servers that we used for the store and other things. There were three: one for the store’s website, one for some WordPress sites/blogs, and one for this site.

The server hosting the store was the most expensive one, but now the site has been reduced to just a couple of static pages, I set those up to run off Bunny.net (that’s a referral link). That should cost a few pennies per months, so the $40 credit I have should cover that indefinitely.

I haven’t figured out what to do with the WordPress blogs, but none of them are active and I’ll probably just turn them into static sites and host them on Bunny.net, too.

The last thing is this server which could be a static site but I like tinkering my little blog engine and think I want to keep it dynamic. I may move the hosting over to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) because they offer some “always” free services that would be more than adequate. I have been really curious to play with their Arm-based compute servers but there has been no availability in the region I picked when signing up.

I need to decide how I want to set up the server on OCI to run this. I’m currently using a pretty simple docker-compose.yml setup to handle running a php-fpm container, a MySQL database server, and Sphinx, with the system nginx fronting things. I already know I want to replace Sphinx, and I think I want to try using Caddy on the front. I guess if I really wanted to be extra and take advantage of the free resources from Oracle that I’d spin up an Autonomous Database instead of using MySQL.

Between credits I have with Bunny.net and Oracle’s free offering, I’ll be paying almost nothing for hosting all of this except for the domain name renewals. That soothes my cheapskate soul.