So I’ve been a busy creator.

I’ve been busy migrating most of my sites off of DreamHost onto my homelab.

This has actually worked pretty well.  I set it up with a Cloudflare frontend, pointing to a DreamCompute proxy server, which has a Tailscale tunnel into my homelab, which is served off of two servers – one a rather beefy webserver and another a less beefy but more server-class gen 8 microserver, as the MySQL server.  Other than being kinda slow (which I think I can fix with caching) it’s working fine.

I wasn’t really unhappy with DreamHost, but there were two reasons I wanted to make this move.  The first was that it was rather expensive.  I was paying $60/mo in hosting fees, and, this also leads into the second reason – it was on a VPS so I couldn’t easily develop or debug… or add additional functionality.  Like, for example, pspell was not available and I couldn’t install it.  So at the expense of a $6 or $12 cloud compute instance, I can get rid off all those VPSes…  which is good for the bottom line and I can redirect those funds elsewhere, while also having a lot more flexibility.

It is a little slower, because the traffic has to transit several more layers, but it kind of is what it is.

One thing I can do now is tie this instance to an ollama server, so I can add AI functionality to Lily.  Not entirely sure what I’m going to use that for, but at least now I have the option.

So we’ll see how this goes.  There’s a lot more administrative overhead – I have to back up offsite to backblaze now, and there’s a truenas server (another gen 8 microserver with SSD drives), and…  yeah.  Sometimes you pay with time what you save with money, but in this case, I think it’s worth it.

I’ll be spending some time speeding this up, but it might take a while as I figure out how to solve that problem.  Caching dynamic data is difficult…