home // text // multi-media // misc // info

[ blog internets ]

Server migration (again)

Hey there! If you’re a frequent user of this website, you may have noticed: nothing, hopefully, once again!

For the second time in just a few months, I’ve completely re-architected my web hosting setup.

Where we left off, I had a small “Nanode” server from Linode just for web hosting, and was paying for a 200 GB Proton Drive as a storage solution for my photo/file backups.

I’d mentioned it last time, but Proton doesn’t seem interested in supporting Linux, so I gave up on using Proton Drive for those backups, and moved… well, back to Nextcloud, funny enough.

This time, however, I’m running Nextcloud and this website from the same DigitalOcean VM, and I have a bit of a better handle on actually running & maintaining Nextcloud.

The choice between Linode and DigitalOcean was mostly a coin toss, but I ended up choosing the latter, because they have a special tier of S3 bucket specifically for “cold storage” archives—files that get created in the bucket, and then remain untouched for months at a time. That’s specifically what I was looking for, as a file backup solution, so I made the switch.

That leaves me looking like this, for now:

  • a single DigitalOcean VM (2 GB RAM, 25 GB storage)
  • a single DigitalOcean S3 cold-storage bucket for my file backups
  • Nextcloud on that DigitalOcean VM (as an interface into those file backups)
  • Nginx to serve my website, as well as a reverse-proxy for Nextcloud

It’s all in one place, the pricing is decent enough, and I’ve learned a bunch. I’m still not entirely confident I know what a reverse proxy is, but I have one, and it’s working.

GitHub Actions

Separately from all of the above, I’ve been hoping to move away from GitHub as much as possible, for a number of practical & ideological reasons (you can join me on Codeberg if you’re so inclined).

As you may recall from my earlier post about my social bots, I was leaning heavily on GH Actions to schedule the actual posts. Cleaning up my cloud computing footprint w/r/t web hosting & file backups had the side benefit of providing me a platform to host & run those bots directly. Now, I can just log into my DigitalOcean droplet, putz around with the code directly, and schedule a cron job to run them as desired.

So that’s nice! Now, any time you see one of my silly little butts post in the socialverse, know that they made my webpage load fractionally slower.

Congratulations!

x