I have the same. A cloud instance at Hetzner, nginx as webserver using certbot for automatic SSL generation. I also use a static site generator which I wrote myself to produce my blog https://norbert.hartl.name https://norbert.hartl.name/ . I use the skeleton CSS library which is tiny and understandable and does not need tons of markup.

This is one of my playgrounds for pillar and microdown. I think pharo settles around this combination to produce documents which is very well suited to produce a website, too.

Norbert

Leo a new student is arriving next week to work on pillar and help to start with.

Stéphane Ducasse
http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr / http://www.pharo.org
03 59 35 87 52
Assistant: Aurore Dalle
FAX 03 59 57 78 50
TEL 03 59 35 86 16
S. Ducasse - Inria
40, avenue Halley,
Parc Scientifique de la Haute Borne, Bât.A, Park Plaza
Villeneuve d'Ascq 59650
France

My cloud instance is 3€/month. With an additional 20% amount the instance has a backup. And setting it up is way simpler then getting dynamic DNS updates and all of that configured. Times have changed a bit.

Norbert

That is cheap 3e/m is definitely worth considering… but I guess you do have to take care of your own patching etc right (which isn’t necessarily horrible, but does require a bit of extra effort to track things). I was interested in whether the next step up in the food chain using Docker images that are hosted for you, might lessen the burden a bit? E.g. if your CI injects a pharo image into the latest “safe” docker image from the community - then hopefully you are insulated from all of this.  It does look like this is becoming a reality if that dockerize.io soln plays out (I got that working, its cheap - however they haven’t answered any of my email queries… so I do wonder how real it actually is). The fallback would definitely be something like Hetzner or Digital Ocean I guess.

Tim

What do you use that's so cheap/affordable?

El lun., 12 de abril de 2021 04:48, Norbert Hartl norbert@hartl.name
escribió:

Although my main instance is on Digital Ocean, I have a test/play instance on AWS.

This is really hip & cool: it is an AWS Graviton 2 instance (Amazon's own ARM64 CPU, much like Apple Silicon) [ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/ ]. I run a small t4g.micro instance, 1GB RAM, 8GB Disk.

Last bill was just USD 2.89 which is crazy cheap for a full month 24/7.

Thanks to the fact that Pharo has a full JIT VM on ARM64, this is crazy fast as well.

I am sure that the reason this is so cheap is the fact that it is super efficient.

You can try this easily for yourself.

These are some useful inputs - its definitely getting to a place where a little pocket money gives you a real environment to hobby deploy to (even professionally if you are careful i guess).

Sven - presumably this Graviton setup is an EC2 instance - and so you patch your own OS and provide any additional pieces like SSL cert etc right? (which I know you are ace at doing - but I find that that I painfully learn how to do it one month, and then 6 months later have to relearn it all again).

So I'm interested in how reasonable it is to live higher up the food chain - where it seems that a Docker image insulates you (in theory) from a lot of this. Is this true - and are options like dockerize.io (or others that perhaps I am missing) viable options for the time constrained?

(really appreciate all the input in this thread everyone - its very instructive)

Tim

On Tue, 13 Apr 2021, at 7:43 AM, Sven Van Caekenberghe wrote:

I really like the Dockerize option, seems pretty straight forward, I wonder
how you could manage volumes for DB containers, static assets and how
flexible/configurable is the routing/scaling.

Unless, as it seems, everything is stateless there.

Esteban A. Maringolo

On Tue, Apr 13, 2021 at 8:36 AM Tim Mackinnon tim@testit.works wrote: