Category Archives: Cloud

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I’m on AWS

I’m gland (and proud) to announce that my blog is now hosted on Amazon EC2.

I was running this blog on my personal laptop using NO-IP to reattach my dynamic IP to my domain every time my computer rebooted.

The reason why I decided to move my blog on AWS is mainly because having a laptop running all day(s) long just to host a blog was a waste of money and energy.

AWS is free for the first year. Anyhow, given the traffic I will have on my blog it will be still cheaper than hosting it on my laptop.

AWS is great. It allows you to customize your environment at the nth power and it costs you only for the actual usage (the less people I will have on my blog, the less I will pay.. so please go away :)

Moving WordPress from my laptop to AWS was a 10 years old game.
Just run a mysqldump, copy all WordPress files with rsync (or scp if you prefer) and create the Apache VirtualHost and that’s it.

It took me few hours only because I had some issue setting up the users for MySQL.

If you are wondering why I’m running my blog on my own environment rather than running it on wordpress.com, these’re the answers:
1. Challenges – I can do what WordPress is doing
2. Data ownership – All data is mine and managed by me only… at some extent since everything is still hosted in the cloud.
3. I might use this EC2 instance for other project.. still without spending a penny!

I’m a happier (and richer and more eco-friendly) man now :)

Nico

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OwnCloud

If you are worried of your data being spread on the internet and if you’re not 100% sure on how your data is actually handled by the giant (google), here’s a solution for you.

I’m sure this is not new for most of you but maybe I’ll catch that 1% not yet aware of.

OwnCloud is a web application you can install on your linux box which you can use as your own cloud (indeed).

All the services you get from most of the cloud services available for free (document sharing, file sharing, calendar sharing) are going to be available through this fantastic free and open source application.

All you need is:

Install the app on your linux box. It’s a very easy process and well documented on www.owncloud.org

If you, like me, are using a broadband service with dynamic ip definition, you need to set up a service (no-ip for example) to dynamically associate the changing IP address to a domain you previously bought.

And that’s it.. your own private cloud is there.. ready to be shared only with people you trust and being sure that no one is gonna have a look at your bank account details ;)

Just make sure to backup your date regularly or even better to buy a raid hardrive for the peace of mind. After all your privacy is priceless!!

 

Nico