I decided to move my blog from my hosting in my Cisco C220 upstairs in my attic to a lightsail product on AWS (Is it AWS or aws?). Why did I decide to do this after refusing to for ~10 years? Well, mostly I know a guy who started at AWS and I figure if AWS is ever a company I want to work for I need to have production systems on it, not just science projects in the cloud.

I was going to do an EC2 image, but one of the first things you discover in the updated console is a compute service named Lightsail. Lightsail has the storage and network packaged in, and then also common applications, and wordpress is about the most common of them all.

The process was simple, standing up the lightsail image was ~5 minutes. I exported everything from my on-prem blog, and imported it into the new AWS image. The first import did not really go well — my on-prem blog has a user named ‘neville’ and the created AWS lightsail image has a root user called ‘user’. Importing my content to ‘user’ instead of ‘neville’ was a problem for me. The solution is not to fix and rename the user account, the correct fix was to create another lightsail image and create the new user ‘neville’ there before importing. Treat these cloud compute instances like cattle, not pets. If there is an issue kill it and get another one off the feed lot.

One thing that did happen, that I’m not too happy about though, I decided to create my 2nd lightsail image bigger (2x the RAM and storage — from the $3.5/month to the $5/month). When I got the new one up I quickly deleted the old (you are charged by the hour). Right after I deleted I thought I’d like to do some performance comparisons between the 2 instances— but there is no undo button. You delete it and it is gone 🙁

Overall, meh – fine. I’m sad to see things go from my attic, but as Andy Jassy says “you can’t fight gravity”. In this case, I can’t fight the cloud.