Async.fi

Gone DigitalOcean

In order to try something new (and save money) I switched my personal "utility" server from EC2 to DigitalOcean. As I was running just a t1.micro instance anyway, I selected DigitalOcean's cheapest offering, which costs $5/month (512MB/20GB(SSD)/1TB). Plus $1/month for regular backups (they somehow backup the whole server while the server is running, so I'm not sure how consistent said backup can possibly be but at least it's cheap).

DigitalOcean is offering just servers, and the whole experience isn't of course quite as polished as with Amazon. Nor can you, say, access S3 (or other services) at quite the same speed as when in Amazon's network. But for my use case it's a good fit.

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Gone static

Update 2: Looks like page load times, at least as reported by Pingdom, went up from what they initially were. In my own testing cached pages still load in something like 150 to 250 milliseconds but Pingdom disagees. I don't know if this is regular CloudFront performance fluctuation, some kind of impedance mismatch between Pingdom and CloudFront or "something else".

Update: That really did the trick and the estimated -90% page load time wasn't that far off:

Having been fed up with wastefulness (resource wise) and general slowness of the MySQL/PHP/WordPress/CloudFlare setup for some time, I have now moved this site to S3/CloudFront. Site is generated from an XML file (which I derived from a WordPress export dump) with a Python script that is hosted here. Commenting is obviously impossible but if you for some reason need to contact me you'll find contact details on your left.

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Site optimizations

Performace-wise, setting up Amazon CloudFront ("Custom Origin") in addition to WP Minify and WP Super Cache improved site response times a lot. Offloading static content to Amazon not only made those offloaded files load faster (because of Amazon's faster tubes) but this also reduced stress on our feeble-ish server on page load so that the document itself is returned faster. Load time is also more repeatable. Good stuff!

Note that CloudFront makes HTTP/1.0 requests and Apache may take some convincing in order to make it Gzip the 1.0 response.

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Blogging activities migrated to Async.fi

Installing Wordpress and getting the basic settings straight was, all and all, a relatively painless experience. One downside of choosing this particular blogging platform is that I now have to run a MySQL server just for this purpose (I have no intention to use MySQL for anything else as I have actively tried to steer away from RDBMSs, even before this whole "NoSQL" thing became fashionable). I would've preferred to be able to run Wordpress on top of an SQLite backend, just because that would've kept things one step simpler, but I just could not get the "PDO (SQLite) For WordPress" adapter to work with a reasonable amount of work, so I gave up and went ahead with a MySQL server install. So it's a tradeoff (what isn't?) but with all these plugins and stuff and whatnot that this system supports I think it's a pretty good deal. I went through the old posts at sivuraide.blogspot.com and imported what I thought I might find useful at least to some extent. Unsurprisingly not too many of the old posts fall to this category. Then again, the old blog is titled Code Notebook. The old posts did not "just work" in all places, a quick eyeballing revealed some glitches that need to be ironed out. I installed the following plugins in addition to what was bundled:

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