New Year New Blog

The hardware may have changed, but the blog is still the same.

This is not a typical sports card post

This blog post is not the usually sport card blog post. My other hobby (and job) is programming. I have been programing web sites and services for over 10 years now. Along with programming, I like to tinker with servers and provisioning web sites.

This blog is powered by WordPress, which means it runs on php and MySQL. The site has been hosted on shared hosting since it started in 2014. I had been contemplating moving my blog off of shared hosting and onto it’s own virtual cloud server for a while now, but never had the time to perform the migration. So last weekend I finally made the leap and moved the blog onto it’s own Digital Ocean VPS.

The shared host was good, but there were times when the site was slow and uploading photos would fail at times due to the memory resizing images consumes.

The new VPS server has a one gigabyte of ram to itself and full utilization of the cpu (this helps with image resizing). The site now sits on nignx, with static caching, so if the site grows (yeah, right) it can handle the traffic with little worry. I noticed right away when uploading multiple photos the increased power and decreased wait time. Nice.

The cost will actually go down from $9 a month to $5 month, but now I have to maintain updates, etc. So to save $4, I now have a little more work. However, this doesn’t bother me as I kind of enjoy it.

I am still tweaking the monitoring and maintenance scripts, but so far it has been running smoothly.