I finally decided to roll back the change to migrate the whole things from the cloud host to the on-premise because the DDNS settings did not work as I wanted. I have tried both the charged solution from Oray, and the free one from NoiP, but neither could get the blog website running as expected. To be honest, I felt the charged solution from Oray is much more complicated to configure than the free one (maybe it’s because I didn’t spend enough time to read their documentation, which is what I am going to do next step as I have purchased their DDNS service).
So for now this website is running on another cloud host which I was planning for some other technology exploring and testing, but things are always changing and so are my plans :).
The main reason that I decided to continue the hosting of the website to the cloud host is the lease of the previous cloud host is going to expire the beginning of next month and the Chinese New Year is just around the corner. I am afraid I won’t have enough time to go through the documentation and troubleshooting of either of the DDNS solutions before the host expires. Fortunately, I have this current host spined up early this year and I haven’t done much testing and configurations on it yet, so it didn’t took me much trouble to get it ready for this website running. This will bring me more than one year to test and configure the DDNS solution but I am not planning to take that long before migrating the website to the on-premise host. We will see.
One thing I notice of myself, or probably it happening to many others as well, is whenever we get something difficult fixed, no matter how difficult it was and how much efforts we spent, we don’t feel it’s difficult any more. Instead, we might even think it’s too easy to make any notes about the process. But the truth is, it’s not that easy and if we face this same or similar situation again, we might need to experience all the trouble again without reference of the previous experience. We can borrow the experience from our memories but memories are not always reliable (to be honest, most of the time, they are not reliable, especially to the cases where more details and a systematic process are needed). So notes can be something we should pay more attentions to, including how we felt when we first saw that problem, how we started the troubleshooting, what solutions we had tried before finding the final and correct one and what could be done even better, etc. The notes might not be that helpful to some situations, like interaction with people or something more relying on feelings and senses, but they are definitely helpful for some situations, including technical issues, complicated cases in our life and mid to long-term plans and carrying out, etc. But this is something I notice most of the people around are not good at. What I see for these people, myself included, is they need to go through everything from the very beginning to the very end again and again for similar situations and thus, their time and energy are spent not that efficiently and wisely. If they can write some notes in time the first time they have experienced that situation, it won’t take them much time but can save quite a lot of time and efforts the next time they are in the same situation. Though practice makes perfect, there are a lot of practice and trial-and-errors we need to experience before we can become good at something. Notes can help us speed things up.
As the old Chinese saying goes, the palest ink is better than the best memory. Do not rely on memory only. Try to add more written notes to better serve the memory.