Move to static site

 Triviality  Comments Off on Move to static site
Mar 042022
 

Several things happened in the past a couple years so I moved this blog site to static, some major issues lead to this change:

  • Google is no longer my preferred service provider, so I’m moving away from AdSense and Analytics
  • I’m no longer actively writing so I don’t expect people interact with me through this site
  • Google is going to stop G Suite legacy so I assume they will stop GCE free tier soon, which I’m running this site at

For now I have an VM running Ubuntu with WordPress installed, I launch the VM whenever I want to write something, then using Simply Static to generate pure static pages then copy to an Nginx server. The Nginx is still running on GCE but since everything’s static, I can easily port it to anywhere cheap whenever needed.

I’ve disabled most dynamic features during this process, like search, comment, AdSense, Analytics, etc. There may be some features that are currently broken, I will fix them whenever I know.

Feb 062013
 

I’m trying my best to use as less EC2 hosts as possible, and seems I successfully made all of my stuffs running on … one micro instance ๐Ÿ˜€ .

Actually it surprised me a little thinking that I was running 2 large, 1 small, and 3 micro back to last September, obviously I spent too much on “playing” ๐Ÿ™ .

Now I’m waiting all crawlers heading to the new machine, I found some crawlers are really … stupid? They didn’t move to the new machine even after the DNS had been update for more than 12 hours.

Dec 132012
 

After last time fire sale I have 3 micro instances running on EC2, one in east coast and two in west. I got a mail the other day, saying my free tier is expiring so I need to make decision if I need to keep it running or not.

It did take me quite some time to figure our which one is free tier, which one is the reserved instance and which one is the left – I have to blame myself as it’s me who made the configuration this messy. Anyway, it seems my major site is running on the free tier (w1), and my reseved instance is actually idle (w2), and the secondary site is on a pay-as-you-go instance (w3).

Anyway, since the free tire will be expired by the end of this month and the reserved instance will be expired in mid January, I decided doing nothing by now. Once the reserved (idle) instace on east cost expired, I will shut it down.

I will keep pay-as-you-go as I got feeling that I may switch to other service providers later on, at least I should try out those Amazon competiters.

Jul 232012
 

I failed to upgrade a friend’s Fedora 15 last year so I left it running there untouched, however, Fedora announced EOL of 15, which means I have to risk leaving it up and running without any further patches, or I have to do an on site upgrade.

Personally I prefer an on site upgrade to make sure everything is up-to-date, but my friend may not like this as the rental (i.e. hosting) will be ended in less a year.

Anyway, waiting for reply now.

Jan 132012
 

I’ve moved to Amazon EC2 as mentioned here and mentioned the monthly pay is $17, that was based on EC2 node’s cost is $14 I think, and after dig into EC2’s offers, I found something more useful, see below:

Amazon has this Reserved Instance which is pretty good to Web servers that needs to be running for all the time, I did some calculation and here is the comparison for 1-year term:

Plan One time Hourly Yearly Monthly (alloc.)
On demand 0 0.020 175.20 14.60
light 23 0.012 128.12 10.68
medium 54 0.007 115.32 9.61
heavy 62 0.005 105.80 8.82

Although 3-years term may save more, I don’t want to sign such a long contract as $8.82 per month is good enough to me now.

I will move to the heavy one after my free tier expires.