I have decided to move this blog onto another platform. In this post I like to describe the reasons for it.
Just let us go back in time my old word press blog was hosted at IONOS. A famous German hosting provider. It was a full managed word press service where I had just access to the word press admin are and for sure some domains and SSL certs included. Because of price adjustments I have searched for another place for my blog.
I know that i want to go away from the managed approach and more having everything under my control. Therefore I have checked three public clouds for replacement: AWS, Azure and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
To be fair my blog is not for business and not generating any money therefore i was very cost sensitive about the new platform. In detail I just need a VM hosting an Apache web server, php-module and a MySQL database. I came to know that OCI is offering some attractive always free instances based on ARM Ampere A1 Compute-instances.
[opc@myserver~]$ lscpu
Architecture: aarch64
Byte Order: Little Endian
CPU(s): 1
On-line CPU(s) list: 0
Thread(s) per core: 1
Core(s) per cluster: 1
Socket(s): -
Cluster(s): 1
NUMA node(s): 1
Vendor ID: ARM
Model: 1
Model name: Neoverse-N1
Stepping: r3p1
BogoMIPS: 50.00
NUMA node0 CPU(s): 0
Flags: fp asimd evtstrm aes pmull sha1 sha2 crc32 atomics fphp asimdhp cpuid asimdrdm lrcpc dcpop asimddp ssbCode-Sprache: PHP (php)Additionally there are some free terraform scripts from Oracle available where you can setup a new environment. The architecture looks like this:
At AWS or Azure even the smallest VM would generate around 10$ of costs per month. On the other hand OCI (its version 2) is relatively new and don’t has the rich services portfolio like AWS. But personally for me it is more than sufficient. This was the decision point where I went for OCI.
I was wondering how easy it was to use ARM-instances because it seems to be very compatible with standard tool sets like word press for example. Oracle Linux which is used has a lot of repos included. Compared with the former hosting I could reduce the latency from 1 second to 500 ms (-50 % less time) when you call the page. For sure because I have now more control of the environment I used some tweaks, like improved apache config, enable http 2-protocol and have more resources in general.
For migrating my word press content I have used the “WP Clone”-plugin. Which worked like a charm.
