:: Kubernetes / K3s / Helm / Redis / MariaDB / Ansible / WordPress / Route 53 / Sendinblue

Ported second generation Chicago Gang History website from Pantheon to a multi-node K3s cluster on Digital Ocean, saving Zach over $400 a month in fees after an unexpected price hike from his hosting provider.

Shortly after the buzz of MS purchasing GitHub I started self-hosting a Gitea stack using a Docker Compose file I threw together just for the occasion. The hosting I chose at the time was a $5 Vultr VPS with the following specs:

• CPU: 1 vCore
• RAM: 1024 MB
• Storage: 25 GB SSD
• Bandwidth: 1000 GB

I chose Vultr partly because they’ve been shown to be faster than DO and Lightsail. But really I just needed a testbed to prove things out. Something I did through sharing knowledge on the Gitea Support forums before, months later, finally feeling confident enough to abandon GitHub.

But Vultr isn’t cutting it anymore. Their $5/month VPS option, while arguably a great deal, isn’t delivering enough storage. Sure I could add block storage at $0.50 per GB or even consider switching to Linode. But I don’t see the point of either when Amazon offers a 40 GB SSD option at $5 an instance with double the bandwidth offered by Vultr and half the cost of the Linode equivalent plan.

As luck would have it, last night I ran out of disk space on Vultr. What better a time to make the switch over to Amazon Lightsail? And if you’re looking to self-host Gitea on Lightsail, here’s how you can too.

So you found out how Smashing Magazine got 10x faster and want to create your own JAMstack website with Hugo. If so, you’re in luck because I’m going to show you how to do it using Amazon Web Services so you don’t end up paying through the nose for hosting or locked into a provider which might disappear.

The need for speed is upon us. Out of the box the speed of an Octopress site kinda drags. However, there are a number of things you can do to to speed it up without a complete overhaul. Learn how to turbocharge your Octopress blog.

In 2016 this website underwent a major overhaul. I took it off my simple Docker set-up and moved it to S3 with CloudFront. The process of which enabled me to reduce hosting costs by 80% all while increasing reach and decreasing page load times globally.

But static websites have a perceived disadvantage: they’re static. They have no inherent dynamic functionality. What will you do when you want to add some piece of interactivity—a contact form, or an email distribution list? Sure you could go with TypeForm or TinyLetter. But you could also create your own service using FaaS (a.k.a. Serverless). Afterall, Serverless isn’t just a fad, and it’s not going away anytime soon.

Glancing over the Octopress plug-ins list yesterday I noticed something I hadn’t seen before, an Image tag & uploader for S3. Curious to tinker around with it I set-up an account for S3 and integrated it today to decrease my blog header background image size and serve it from the cloud with caching.

Follow along to learn how to host images on S3 with Octopress.