I don’t really like the terms “the cloud” or “cloud computing.” They’re not very descriptive, and I hate cloudy weather. Give me sunshine and blue skies any day. Please. Regardless, most of my websites, including the blog are now living “in the cloud.” I flipped the switch to move my blog over about a week ago, and so far so good.

Everything here is running on Amazon Web Services. The web server is an EC2 instance running the Amazon Linux distribution (I’d have preferred FreeBSD, but it doesn’t seem to be a viable option right now). The data is stored in SimpleDB and S3. The images and videos are served by CloudFront. These days, it looks like AWS is a solid platform for personal web hosting, especially since they launched the incredibly cheap “Micro” instances. If you’re considering VPS hosting, I think it’s an option worth considering.

Continue reading “Mostly cloudy or partly sunny?”

I was just looking back through some of my really old posts here, like this one from an anti-war protest in 2003. It’s funny how tiny the photos seem now. Back then they weren’t huge, but they were reasonable, and I was still pretty concerned with making sure things didn’t use too much bandwidth. As you can see, now I don’t pay much mind to that. If you’re still on dialup, I’m sorry (kind of).