June 07 2017
One of the reasons for building this blog site is to be run with as little cost as possible to see what I could do on the ultra-low end, normally I'm working with 24 core monster servers (monster for me OK) and that can let you get pretty lazy in your coding so this was my complete change of pace - squeeze everything I could out of this site and run it on the cheapest server I could find (apologies if its a bit slow but you know it is running on a calculator).
AWS is awesome and I use it a lot at work so naturally it was a good starting place and they have a free tier they offer which gets you a low power server for 12 months at no cost. Now everything was running nice and smoothly but my free tier is just about up so its time for me to re-evaluate my hosting plans.
One small catch is your server must be based in the US, currently mine is expensive because it's based in Sydney and we get screwed over with the Australia Tax on everything (Check out how much an iPhone costs here). Looks like I'm moving to the US!
Setting up the instance was pretty simple and with some googling I had my Ubuntu Server up and running with .Net Core, HAProxy, and Supervisor up and running in no time. Then it is just a case of working out my SSL Certificates. Currently I'm using Lets Encrypt but .Net Websites don't like serving any files out of any folder so the auto-renew is a bit annoying. So I'm forking out some cash for a NameCheap SSL Key at a cost of $9 per year I think that's OK. Once i get that set up and installed it will be as simple as flicking the Cloudflare DNS Settings and I'm off...