web hosting

In the first half of my CDN blog , I talked a little about why I wanted to move my biggest website to leverage cloud delivery of content, and the broad strokes of how I planned to get started. This second half details more of the specifics of how I technically achieved the early days of that transition.

In my day job, we've been steadily moving into the cloud for a while now for all the same reasons everyone else does: it gives us less to maintain ourselves in terms of hardware, it allows us to distribute worldwide more efficiently, it saves us money in the long run, and so on. At home, though, it's a different story, though most of the goals are similar. So now that I have some working knowledge of using Amazon Web Services to create a content delivery network (more commonly known as CDN), I decided it was time to apply it to my largest and oldest hobby site too.

I'm a middleman when it comes to my own webserver. My sites collectively are too large to exist as separate shared hosting with a webhost, but I also want to keep them all organized together and have the flexibility of managing each individual site that would come with a colocated or private server. If you're familiar with non-enterprise web hosting at all, you've probably just said to yourself "he must be on a VPS, then," and you're exactly right.

I host only a half-dozen sites or so ( though I'm looking for more clients! ), so I've got...

I run the server on which this site lives as a managed VPS (with Wiredtree out of Chicago, for what it's worth - I've been with them for the better part of a decade now and have been very pleased with their service). The biggest reason I have it as a VPS is because the traffic I get over at Caves of Narshe is sufficient to make shared hosting solutions a non-starter, but the revenue that CoN brings in is wildly insufficient to run a legit private server - or, indeed, to pay for a VPS on its own. As such, over the years I've brought in a few small clients for whom I maintain and host their...