I've been running this blog with DigitalOcean for a year and a bit now, it was time to switch things up and review what I've got. All in all a pretty painless experience.

For the past year and a bit I've been utilising a DigitalOcean droplet to run the various docker containers, a Volume for persistent storage, Spaces for static content delivery, and Databases for a really clustered overkill MySQL deployment. $30-$35 a month. Ouch.

So today I took the opportunity to review the running containers and the deployment as a whole. How out of date was what I was running? Not very, thanks to Ourborus keeping a watchful eye and updating images to their latest versions. The droplet running Rancher on the other hand... What was I thinking? Why did I choose Rancher over a much more mainstream server OS like Debian? Past me was obviously really into the cutting edge of container deployment.

Cutting out the DigitalOcean Database and replacing it with a container running MySQL (or mariadb) seemed like a sane way to claw back $10 and was the first bookmark on my new deployment. The question was where to deploy? Stick with DigitalOcean and make a new Droplet? I fancied a change, and thus did a rough comparison of Vultr and Linode. Turns out the mighty trio of cloud server hosting (DO, Vultr, and Linode) all offer about the same performance for the same price so I wasn't going to make a saving there. In the end I picked Linode purely because out of the three I found their interface the most friendly. And they were fresh in my mind after seeing them sponser some tech Youtubers.

Next up was the decision on wherever to keep using DigitalOcean Spaces for static storage. This was an easy switch to Wasabi, DO charging $0.02/GB and Wasabi a mere $0.0059/GB. Of great importance at this point is to say switching my static storage to Wasabi appears not to have degraded my site perormance at all, at least not when measured by Pingdom.

As for volumes, while Linode do offer them I've decided not to utilise them this time around and instead just utilise inbuilt Docker volumes and back them up occasionally, alongside the Linode backup.

While switching I also took the time to update my own ghost-with-s3 docker image to the latest Ghost image. Long overdue and I can but apologise to any users of it; I'll try and be more attentive to updating in the future.

So I should now have gone from a $30-35pm bill to a more manageable $15-20. And I've managed to update my own little Docker project in the process and begin to gingerly wade my way back into techy stuff!

I think that's enough of a rambling update post for one day. I mean really it's just disguising a plug for my Linode referral code with $100 credit valid for 60 days - more than Vultr's poultry 30 day limit.