Well the deed is done. I finally have migrated the blog off my home server and onto a hosted provider. The site is finally starting to get big enough that I felt like a migration would be a step in the right direction. When I originally created this blog it was more of an experiment than anything else, but over the past 2 years I have seen the blog and my writing grow in directions I really didn’t anticipate when it was created, which is very exciting for me.
Due to this growth, one of my main concerns is stability. With the stage that this project is in now I just want a place that has good bandwidth and is available 24×7 when I want to write something. I don’t want to have to worry about the power going out at my home or any sort of service disruption to my internet to cause my site to be unreachable. My traffic numbers are relatively low if compared to some other popular websites but they aren’t anything to sneeze at either now that the blog and my writings have become more established and so it is important for me to have the site available all the time to people. If you’re interested in the migration comment or send me a note and I can do a quick write up or go into more depth, but I figured I’d spare the details because there are already a number of good guides out there on how to do it. The only real issue was upgrading from Apache 2.2 -> 2.4.
I’d like to take some time and talk about moving to a cloud provider. It may be an unfamiliar process to some so there might be a few good takeaways by covering the topic briefly. Cloud hosting and cloud technologies are evolving to be much more than just a fad, and a lot of companies are trying to position themselves for the next generation of cloud computing moving forward. Choosing a cloud provider offers a number of benefits including lower over head and maintenance costs with running servers and a data center. It also alleviates infrastructure maintenance, stability issues and dealing with hardware failures and troubleshooting.
There are a very large number of cloud providers out there currently and the competition is fierce. In fact the competition is so fierce right now that Google and Amazon have recently begun a price war.
- Heroku
- Amazon AWS
- Joyent
- Azure
- Rackspace
- Linode
- DreamHost
- Google Cloud Platform
- Digital Ocean
In my current view they are all great in their own way. By that I mean that each of these providers can provide value in their own way. If you are a business looking to move to the cloud the AWS is the way to go. The Amazon cloud has been tested and vetted by some of the largest cloud companies (Netflix, Pinterest, LinkedIn). It has been around for a very long time in cloud years so Amazon has been able to work out most of the issues as well create a golden standard. The trade off is that for somebody new to cloud computing the services and interface can be confusing. There are a lot of bells and whistles, which many people do not need.
If you’re a Microsoft shop you might take a look at the Azure platform. Azure does a really good job of integrating with other Microsoft products and services. This would be a logical move for anybody that leverages Microsoft technologies.
Rackspace and Joyent both leverage OpenStack for their underlying architecture. OpenStack is open source software so there are some really interesting things revolving around that platform and technology.
Ultimately I decided to go with Digital Ocean for this project for a couple of reasons. First, the price was there. My blog doesn’t require a lot of horsepower so I was able to spin up a 1GB, 1CPU, 30GB, 1TB bandwidth Ubuntu server on DO for $10/month. The second reason that I like DO and which many other people are moving towards DO is that the setup and configuration process is stupidly simple and easy. Create an account, setup a credit card and away you go, up into the clouds. The process from start to having a new server up literally took me 10 minutes.
That is the beauty of DO’s approach to cloud. Make things as simple as possible for people to get up and going. Certainly there aren’t nearly as many features as many other platforms but for many scenarios people just want a server to play around with, and DO does a great job of making that possible.
The point I’m trying to get at here is that there are basically different tools for different jobs. You need to evaluate what all is out there and how it will suit your needs. If you aren’t a Microsoft shop then you might not need to use Azure. The good news is that with all of this competition and rivalry prices are dropping and more options and niches are becoming available as products mature and as new providers enter the scene. The cloud introduces some pretty neat features and technologies but ultimately you need to decide what you or your business is looking for before you make a decision.
