Bye Bye AWS. So, I decided to come down from AWS EC2 and RDS this month. Mostly over cost. It just didn’t make sense to be spending $50/mo to host EC2 and RDS when I had an Intel NUC laying around with 8GB of ram and a commercial Comcrap internet connection. My IP has been stable for over 6 months so I figured it was safe to host on it. Commercial accounts can host without penalty, but Comcrap likes to overcharge $20 for a static IP. It’s worth pointing out that this used to be much cheaper but a combination of a gouging opportunity, limited availability, and scooping by larger organizations is just too much to pass up for their sales zombies. I call them sales zombies because they aren’t smart enough to screen their mailing list against existing customer names and addresses. Same thing for their call list. I regularly get calls that go like this “His this is Seth Zombie with Comcrap. I’m calling to see if you are stupid enough to talk to me about my over-priced VOIP, Commercial Cable, or high speed internets.” “My manager hates me, please call me back so I can mark you as a victim in my spreadsheet….” Too bad they don’t put the same amount of effort in to customer service. That’s a totally different call. Fortunately I haven’t had to deal with them in a while.
Anyhow, back to AWS. I set up the latest LTS version of Ubuntu. True to form they’ve introduced some annoying new changes to networking that throw everyone’s documentation out the window. Thank goodness they haven’t been acquired like the sellouts known as RedHat. Red is right….. as in red light, like whores that they are. Anyhow, the config was relatively uneventful. Took a few minutes to get the Firewall setup. I’m using a SonicFall (Sonicwall) Pathetic piece of shit firewall. I stopped paying ransom for support last year. No, I will not pay $200/yr for support on a $250 device. Apparently neither will anyone else because they are cheap as hell on fleabay. To their credit, India will help you configure it. Of course wouldn’t it be easier if you didn’t need to ask for help to set the damn thing up? Even Cisco isn’t this difficult to use, and they are notoriously obtuse so that you can pay a CCIE to cut and paste a config into your router. CI$CO can burn in hell.
WordPress Migration is really simple. Tarball your site, download it, unzip it, set permissions and chownership. Export your DB, tarball it, copy it down, un tarball it, import it. Config the DB location and username. Load the page and try your luck.
Between a decent firewall and Wordfence it’s pretty safe to host WordPress on your own server. Of course, the average person shouldn’t do this, but if you are an IT person you should be able to. It helps to also reduce the attack surface on your WP site. Things like using .htaccess to restrict access to certain directories help. I will continue to use Cloudfront for CDN along with Amazon’s DNS service. Both are rediculously cheap and scaleable, which limits the ability of script-kiddies to pull a DOS attack on your site. They might chew up a few $ of data, but no big deal. Good luck trying to crash an Amazon DNS server. lol.
That’s the update for now. I have some stuff in the works for Nanohawk. More to follow eventually.
