Hosting Bills: Paid!

Whelp, I'm glad I've enough to pay for my various hosting fees this year. They are usually small enough that I don't explicitly budget for them, but they aren't that small that they can be considered negligible, even if I am drawing an actual income instead of pulling it out of my savings as is this sabbatical.

For the uninitiated, the hosting fees are for a [virtual] server that runs The_Laptop's Domain, and another that is used to host my Apache Subversion code repositories.

``Subversion? Code repositories? Use github/gitlab lol!'' No, I don't want to, and more importantly, I don't have to. The use cases for these code repositories are strongly personal in nature, and are used mainly for me to track changes effortlessly. They also provide a fallback in case of a screw up that I did, or as a quick way to bootstrap a new system up. None of them are ever intended to become some kind of publishable code, and I am the only developer touching the code base anyway. So the centralised model of Subversion, running on my own server as opposed to a public one, is good enough.

I used to run my Subversion repositories off some other hosted platform for many years for really cheap. Then they had new management, and started to think that they were some kind of CI/CD shop (with Subversion), and tossed a whole lot of new features on it. All that was fine---I just didn't have a use for them, so I didn't bother. But then they decided to charge about 12× the price for all these new features that I didn't need---that was when I started exploring alternatives. I found that I could run my own Subversion server off Linode for like a third of the price, with the added benefit of having more space made available, and weekly virtual disk image back-ups. The caveat was that I had to manage that server on my own, but it was pretty low maintenance Linux administration work---it was basically fine.

And so I upped my roots from that old service and moved it over to the new one that I had up and running in well under a day. It cost about 4× the original amount I paid, but it was still preferable over the 12× that was the asking---and that was after the customer service representative was trying to give me a discount [for the first year(?)] to keep me on their platform.

``Linode? Use AWS lol!'' No, I don't want to. I only need one measly [puny] server to run what I want to run, and I don't want to have my entire life tied to the AWS eco-system where if any sub-system detects abuse (true or otherwise), I get kicked out of everything in the eco-system with little to no recourse. I don't need it to be scalable, I don't need access to crazy services, and I don't need it to be ``managed'' by AWS in such a way that if I want to up and go, I cannot easily do that.

Anyway, that's all I want to talk about for now. Till the next update.