Digital Maintenance 2020

I've made some updates to this site. Both frontend and backend changes.

My EC2 reserved instance was set to expire on August 12th this year. I like to keep a remote virtual private server instance running 24/7. I don’t want to spend a lot of money on it, so just something cheap and accessible. The virtual private server is used to host this site and a few other small things. I occasionally use it as a VPN or do some SSH tunneling in a pinch. It falls into the space of personal and career experimentation/growth. I don’t view it as any kind of production box.

The last 3 years I have been using an AWS micro EC2 reserved instance with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS for this purpose. It served me well while costing me less than $4 a month. After 3 years I decide to try something new. I'm giving Linode a try since I had a $100 coupon code and heard good things about this provider.

I initially planned to only migrate and recreate what I already had running. Maybe just a few security updates. But like most technology adventures, I did not have any clear scope defined, so my initial task quickly grew in scope. Here is a quick list of what I have accomplished so far.

• Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Setup and network hardening
• Migration of files and content from AWS
• Setup Nginx reverse proxy and automated letsencrypt with acme.sh
• Replaced hexo as static site generator with home grown single node.js script
• Created a new custom website theme

I was tempted to go further but stopped with these changes. I'm hoping to make more changes in the future, but I'm not committing to anything yet.

I still use AWS for S3 and CloudFront. I want to try out Cloudflare as a CDN but wasn’t willing to mess with DNS records.