My website has been hosted on my home server since its Hello World! inception about 2 years ago. It has been very stable; Uptime Robot, a free service that tracks uptime, reported my site was up 99.81% during the past month.
When my website becomes unreachable, the service pings my phone via Pushbullet. Sometimes my IP changes and I need to update the DNS record in GoDaddy. Other times, there is a more serious issue with my home server.
In the interest of my sanity, and for the benefit of home network security (I have no reason to open ports 80 and 443 on my router anymore), I began to pursue other hosting options.
Over the past year, I have become well-versed in AWS' suite after working with it daily. Cloud services have greatly eased the pain of development by mitigating worries about hardware. Cloud computing also becomes cheaper every year, and competition helps drive down prices even further.
Of course, Amazon is not infallible. Just recently in late February, Amazon inadvertently took down much of the internet due to us-east-1 downtime in S3. If the layman wasn't aware of much of the internet's dependence on Amazon's services before, they certainly were on February 28th.
Amazon promises that its S3 service will be available 99.99% of the time, which is certainly enough for my use. You may already know that this site is generated by Jekyll. I found s3_website, a gem that ties Jekyll and S3 together.
The gem's usage was pretty self-explanatory, and I was able to migrate my existing configuration to use S3 with little trouble. I use two cron jobs to publish changes to S3. The first is invoked on reboot and watches a directory in my Dropbox:
@reboot /usr/local/bin/jekyll build -s ~/Dropbox/website/ -d ~/Documents/website/_site/ --incremental --watchThe second calls s3_website push every minute:
* * * * * cd ~/Documents/website;/usr/local/bin/s3_website pushIf no changes have been made, the program exits quickly, consuming negligible CPU cycles. I also change into my website directory first because s3_website operates on the current directory by default and its --site=[PATH] option didn't work for me.
After a week on S3, Uptime Robot reports my website has been reachable 100% of the time. I'd call that a successful transition from self-hosting to a cloud-based solution!