Holy moly an update!

Wow, I've finally done it. After almost 4 years since my last blog post (and even then it was a copy/paste from the old hi.co platform), I've actually written something new to this website! 🎉

I've been wanting to do something here for a long time, but since the shutdown of hi.co, I've been rather unmotivated to write. Not just because hi.co ended, but also that combination of life factors and some strong procrastination that just kept me away.

I always wanted to make some major updates to this website before I did anything else, but with all of the programming I'm doing at work, one of the last things I want to do when I get home is to do more programming, so that first step of making changes here never happened. It's partly why some of the open-source projects I'm on have been neglected too.

The website update had to happen though. Last year I stopped the auto-renewal for the Virtual Private Server (VPS) I paid for to host this site, so I had limited time to finally make a change. A VPS was good for me at the time (~2011) as I felt the space for Java-based web hosting wasn't all that great for someone who really wanted to tinker with things. So I bought a server where I could do whatever the heck I wanted with it, and it was fantastic for a while.

A few years on and I learned that server administration really wasn't my thing. My interests lay more with web development than infrastructure, and the constant OS updating and DB maintenance and security hardening really wore at me. Nowadays, the internet landscape has changed and "the power of the cloud" (ugh) has spawned a tonne of companies whose sole job is to look after platform or infrastructure or whatever word they want to use for the parts I don't like.

So, with my VPS subscription quickly coming to an end, and as late as I am to the whole platform/infrastructure-as-a-service bandwagon, I finally made the necessary changes to ditch my VPS and jump aboard that metaphorical cloud that everyone keeps buzzing about.

(More details about the new website "architecture" in a future post - this one is already looking rather long.)

So a big thank you to Openhost who were my VPS provider for the last 8 years. I had no issues with their VPS', their responses to my support requests were timely, and any time something did go wrong it was mostly my own fault for not doing a better job of knowing how to manage a server! If anybody in NZ is reading this and is in the market for an in-country VPS, give them a look 😉