Welcome to the housewarming party, because we’re now hosted on Digital Ocean! Pull up an ethernet cable, pour some packets into a glass and enjoy that sweet new IaaS feeling without having to lift a washing machine.

We’re on our forth cyber-home here at The Serpent, thanks to AWS increasing costs for reserving static IP’s. After a little shopping to compare compute, storage and network costs - Digital Ocean came out the cheapest (for now). The move went super smootly, thanks to how we package our Serpent application, and years of doing it wrong.

We shopped around of course, comparing AWS with Azure, GCP, Oracle and even IBM. While Oracle\IBM are throwing decent amounts of free tier goodies to new customers, they still charge quite a preium for static IPv4 addresses. Something Digital Ocean seems to have avoided.

We’re also not quite ready to go fully IPv6 yet. Give it another 10 years.

What the move did teach us however is that having a ready to go jekyl based package, and a repository for our source code, management scripts, backend and all the other crap we host - made the process extremely easy with only about 15 minutes of downtime. Even our Matrix friends only complained six times (you get what you pay for @ampe!). It also highlighted the value in not being locked into specific cloud services, by using generic opensource tools and ensuring that any services we do use, aren’t proprietary to that vendor. While many make these services exportable, there’s a complex process involved, and we wanted to avoid all that.

So from Tripod, to 1&1, to AWS and now to Digital Ocean - we hope our new home serves us well for the future.

Until of course they jack up the prices.

	Posted May 24, 2024
	Written by John Payne