Unauthoritative Pronouncements

The whole reason I wrote this blogging “engine” is because I was inspired by Casey Liss writing his own. A major decision was where to put the blog, but instead of picking Heroku, I elected to go the VPS route. Even though I was intimidated at the time, I’ve never looked back on that choice with regret. Heroku has many nice things, but it lacked the flexibility I wanted. I found out through Casey’s blog that Heroku is limiting the operational time of apps on the free tier, but they are offering a hobby tier, with restrictions, at $7 a month. That’s baffling to me when almost every company offering a VPS offers far less restrictive plans for $5 a month.

Now, I might just be a simple, country lawyer (I’m not) but that seems like it is not a very good deal. It is not a significant amount of money, but it’s enough that I wouldn’t recommend anyone with a pet project go play with it on Heroku instead of setting up a VPS. At least Casey has momentum, and he’ll save time by not having to adapt or change, his setup.

Of course, Constantin Jacob wrote a wiki to install and run Camel on a VPS from scratch… Erm, so…

For anyone that is considering moving over to a VPS, I do encourage you to do so. It is very easy to get up and running. The fine-tuning can be a breeze, or a real slog, depending on the specific needs of the task you want to do. With something like Heroku, the boundaries are defined, but there’s so much freedom in running a server that the lack of restriction can be daunting. It’s a bit like looking at a blank page, so give yourself a little “writing exercise” of serving some static files.

My setup? An Ubuntu droplet (out of the box) that serves static files with Twisted (not out of the box). It’s even easy to manage things on the go with tools like Panic’s Prompt and Transmit.

Problems I’ve faced:

• I quickly found out I did not like Apache.
• SimpleHTTPServer should never be used.
• I forgot the correct command to invoke the daemon that runs Twisted.
• Wanting to serve two domains required setting up a virtual host, but the guy who created Twisted helped me in their IRC.
• I forgot about a server migration that restarted the server, even though DigitalOcean gave me ample warning.

That’s really not that bad, right? There’s nothing really messy, even less so if you’re better equipped than I am. After all, I am a simple, country lawyer (still not true).

If you want to try out DigitalOcean, feel free to use my referral link for a $10 credit, which is 2 free months to give it a shot. Or try Linode, or whatever else. It’s better than paying Heroku $7 a month to host a blog.