The current host for this blog website is on Tencent cloud and the rental is going to end by the comming February, so I will need to figure out a solution to keep the website running, either extending the current host rental or migrating the service to another host, on cloud or on-premise. Extending the existing cloud host is quite expensive compared with the initial purchase as this host was purchased when Tencent offered some very generous discounts and they are still offfering similar discounts but only to new hosts. Extending the contract will cost several times more money, so I will focus on the option 2.
As I have some very old physical computers at home which can still support Linux quite well without desktop experience, I was determined to migrate the service to the physical computers and set up DDNS to support this website to be accessed from outside. And I am planning to prepare two hosts and configure them as load balance to hosting the service so that I can do some maintenace work for them one by one without stopping the service. It’s definately not a hard need as this is just a blog mainly for myself to record something personal, whether it’s learning experience, thoughts, some fun or learning and practicing new technologies, so it won’t do any harm to take it down for any maintenance. But load-balance is something we use quite frequently in our production environment and I have the resources to set it up, so why not?
I have reimaged the two computers to ubuntu and the next step is to complete the basic server settings, like firewall, necessary component installation and configurations. Then it will be to back up the data of this running website to the local hosts for the final migration. I haven’t completed the actual to-do list for the migration which I will work on next as well. So the main tasks are 1) getting the website running on these physical hosts before the cloud host stops running; 2) getting the load-balance configured so that if any one of the host is down, the service is still available; 3) I am planing to manage these hosts and several other linux hosts, on-premise and cloud, with Ansible, so getting Ansible set up and ready for the management.
These are the three goals I’d like to achieve for this migration and I still have about two months left though mainly for the weekends. And also I’d like to formalize my personal knowledge base as I am getting more and more systems running, whether it’s more related to what I do for my daily work or just for my personal interests and curiosities to learn new skills, like web development, etc. So I’d better hurry up but I know the knowledge base one can take longer. I just need to keep things well organized in my existing documentations so when I figure out the best platform for my knowledge base, I can just migrate all my documentations there.