cloud

In the first half of my CDN blog, I talked a little about why I wanted to move my biggest website to leverage cloud delivery of content, and the broad strokes of how I planned to get started. This second half details more of the specifics of how I technically achieved the early days of that transition.

In my day job, we've been steadily moving into the cloud for a while now for all the same reasons everyone else does: it gives us less to maintain ourselves in terms of hardware, it allows us to distribute worldwide more efficiently, it saves us money in the long run, and so on. At home, though, it's a different story, though most of the goals are similar. So now that I have some working knowledge of using Amazon Web Services to create a content delivery network (more commonly known as CDN), I decided it was time to apply it to my largest and oldest hobby site too.

Keep your cloud backup in case of true disaster, but also keep as much around locally as possible. The most likely issue you face as a computer user or your family's IT tech is a busted or corrupted hard drive, and the more you have locally the faster you can recover and not feel the data-loss-nausea that I had for most of the last fortnight.