Moving day!
No, this isn't referring to me. I just moved back to Seattle, I'm not about to move everything again!
This is more of a technical update. The site has switched hosting providers, from https://ghost.org/ to a cheaper solution. If you are reading this I am now responsible for managing and maintaining the site, for better or for worse. While I appreciate the Ghost platform for creating a good WYSIWYG editor without having to deal with the heft that WordPress now has - not to mention the drama, thanks Automaticc - its hosting pricing was a bit too much for a simple blogger like me. I was naive when I bought the starter hosting pricing from Ghost. It was so convenient to start up a blog and write through my cancer as a form of therapy that I didn't think much about the 9$/month hosting costs.
Looking back on it, I was an idiot. The Ghost platform is so lightweight that I can run it on a low-end Raspberry Pi. I'm no Ed Zitron or Cory Doctorow, no one cares about what I write. Heck, I don't even think anyone reads this but me, and even that is questionable. A $108/year vanity expense is unnecessary in this economy, especially when if you apply a little effort you can get something for a lot cheaper - or even free!
After some poking around I learned about Oracle's free tier of compute. They claim that they will always offer 2 AMD-based VMs with 1GB ram to their users, as a gateway drug into their paid offerings. 1GB is more powerful than my own Raspberry Pi, so I happily signed up and spun up my own blogging instance. Thankfully the Ghost documentation made setting up my own instance very easy
Oracle is a multi-billion dollar company whose multi-billion-dollar owner (Larry Ellison) owns 98% of the sixth-largest Hawaiian Island and has directly funded Israeli apartheid projects such as illegal annexation projects in Jerusalem and is subject to a lawsuit alleging that he is conspiring to ethnically cleanse Palestinians. I don't really intend to give this man any money. I'll happily take his in order to host this blog though!
#nonspon
Migrating from ghost.org to here was a little bit harder. Ghost provides a very good tool that allows you to export your posts and theme and settings and bring them over to your new site.
How to port your Ghost content between instances
- On the host, go into Settings -> Advanced -> Import/Export and click on "Export Content"
- Save the zip file to your downloads folder
- On the destination, go into Settings -> Advanced -> Import/Export and click on "Universal Import"
- Select the zip file in your downloads folder, and upload that.
- You're done!
- Wait, why aren't the pictures ported over with the site?
- Do I have to manually go on each blog post and download the pictures and re-upload them to each blog post?
- That's not bad, I don't have too many blog posts right?
- ....
- It's a good thing that Ivy is cute.
After going through the above ordeal I was nearly complete in my self-hosting journey! My final step was to make the blog accessible via URL, since no one memorizes IP addresses any more - it's a skill that has died like remembering your friend's phone numbers. Thankfully the domain name ivycat.wtf was still available for sale, so I purchased a 5-year lease on the name from Porkbun for less than the cost of one year of ghost.org hosting. I set up a free-tier Cloudflare tunnel (read the documentation here: https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/connections/connect-networks/get-started/create-remote-tunnel/) to securely point my URL to my host, and I'm good to go.
So my final annual cost for blogging has become:
$80 for the domain name/5 years + free Cloudflare tunnel + free Oracle hosting = 16$/year
That sure as heck beats the 108$/year that I was previously paying Ghost for this zero-traffic website. They can keep that money as a "thank you" for creating such a useful tool, but I don't intend on paying it again next year.