Starting The Blog

A quick post to go through my blog starting experience. I spent 7 hours today battling to setup my own hardware server to host my new blog. I'll go into it more later, but the attempt was more complex than ever needed. Take an older Windows server box, install ESXi, load CentOS then deploy Ghost blogging. Fight permissions, fight the old hardware drivers, fight CentOS.

While I enjoy these technical challenges, at the end of the day, $60 a year to host this blog with Digital Ocean won't even cover the electricity to run that server in my expensive PG&E utility. Let alone the security requirements, time elements and aggravation when something needs fixing or changes.

I didn't want to pay $10 a month to have Ghost host it themselves. I don't even know if this will last, as much as I really desire it to. But $5 a month with Digital Ocean, and the point and click simplicity seemed too low to pass up.

Why did that double digit cost seem like such a high bar? Maybe we'll explore that later. There's plenty to come on investment and costs...

Lesson learned for today, or is it tomorrow yet?