Setting up barborak.com.
I had been hosting barborak.com for years on a virtual server I got from 1&1. It was fine but I found I wasn't really using it for anything but a fairly static website and email forwarding. I figured I should be able to find what I needed dirt cheap or at least for a lot less than the $35/mo that I was paying to 1&1 and Network Solutions.
I had looked at alternatives over the years but never found quite what I wanted. But recently I looked with fresh eyes at what Google Domains provides. The main thing I liked was the $12/yr domain registration and free email forwarding for up to 100 addresses. So I switched from Network Solutions to Google Domains.
I figured I would use the Google App Engine to host my static website but when I started uploading my files I quickly discovered a limit of 32MB on the file size. This meant I couldn't host my videos. Now hosting my own videos is not too smart but I'm not interested in crossing that bridge right now and so I looked for a different solution.
I'm glad I did that because AWS provides a lot of great and
cheap services for hosting static content. This guide
made it very easy to setup a CDN-supported static website with
SSL support. I keep my content in a local git repository and
when I'm ready to push it I use the AWS shell. (It
installs to the python scripts folder as aws-shell which should be added to
your path like so set PATH=%PATH%;\Python27\Scripts.) The
command I use is
s3 sync "/Users/Mike
Barborak/Documents/workspace/barborak.com/www/."
s3://barborak.com
.
Earlier I said that barborak.com is fairly static. Well, the one non-static piece is Sassubot. Previously I was running a Java service on my virtual server for this but now I needed a different solution. I went back to the Google App Engine which supports Java servlets - just a hop, skip and jump away from what I was already doing. With a little bit of work I was able to adapt it to Google App Engine's way of doing things.
I have yet to get a clear picture of my savings but I believe I've gone from $420/yr to approximately $25/yr.