To the Cloud!

I dun invested in cloud hosting, partly in an attempt to save money (although it now appears this won’t happen), and partly simply to get on board the Cloud Bus.

So a few weeks ago I signed up for an Amazon EC2 account, and set about moving moxypark.co.uk (my portfolio site) over to the new Django instance I set up.

Painless seems not to do the process justice. Following the Poets’ Guide I was able to get setup really quite quickly. Then a guide on setting up Django so you won’t lose your database if you turn your instance off, which I strayed from a little (as I use MySQL as opposed to PostgreSQL for my database stuff).

Amazon’s “elastic IPs” mean you can bind DNS records to a specific IP address that won’t change, no matter which actual physical piece of circuitry is fulfilling your request. The only thing I need to think about is how I store my media (images, JavaScript files, MP3s, etc) for other sites, as there seems to be a bit of a delay in copying changes across all the physical pieces of kit around the world (ie: when you change a file, the changes will be seen sometimes, and other times you’ll see the old version, as all the machines in the cloud need time to sync… a crude explanation).

But all in all it’s a good start, and a great way to start growing without breaking the bank. I’ve got a bunch of other sites to move over there (TweetPaste probably won’t be going, for what it’s worth) during the next month, then I will be a complete cloud dweller.

Wheeeeeee! (That’s me flying around in the clouds, yeah?)