Major Overhaul of my Projects
I recently got hammered by AWS for not keeping my single micro Postgres instance up to date. It was going to cost me a fortune a month to keep it running and I spotted this way too late. In addition to this, I was also massively overpaying for a load balancer sat in front of ECS Fargate running the web application robparkers.photography. The overall bill was going to be over three-figures for the month due to carelessness and over-engineering.
There was a reason for doing this at the time, a lot of the hobby projects I pick up are to help me to learn through doing, and because AWS was heavily used in my last two roles I inevitably spent a lot of time in that ecosystem. Additionally, in the spirit of choosing boring technology I would re-use some components from previous projects so that I could quickly get to the ’new’ thing the project was helping me to learn. If those templated bootstrap components were expensive to run (which they were) the costs would mount and I’d be forced to either wind the project down completely, or keep it going at a high cost.
After receiving the surprise bill I decided enough was enough. I paid upfront for a new VPS from ScalaHosting and moved everything there. That includes this blog and the photography project robparkers.photography. All that was left was the S3 buckets, ECR images, Lambdas and CloudFront distributions, all of which are super low cost, less than five quid a month to keep running. All compute now takes place on the new VPS.
The difference in cost is shocking. It now costs me less than $30 per month to run the two projects above, with enough cpu and memory remaining to comfortably run an Arma Reforger server for a few friends, as well as a Grafana dashboard for the VPS health. I still have headroom to do more if I wanted.