Vercel and mastohost

Update 2/11/23:

I ran an instance of Mastodon on a giant Oracle Cloud Free Tier VPS (4 CPU/24GB RAM/200GB SSD). But, there are now reports that Oracle is becoming quite aggressive at reclaiming “idle” instances. I wasn’t going to put in payment information just so that I can keep using the free tier.

I migrated the Mastodon install over to a fresh Azure setup and even got to do a Mastodon 4.1.0 upgrade, which was easy and simple. But, it was sucking up my time – not because it’s hard, but because I like to tinker and I found myself spending way too much time just playing around. I migrated my followers back to orangebunny.net and ran toot self-destruct on the self-hosted instance (it was nice knowing you happyorange.xyz).

A week after I had signed up with the “Moon” package on mastohost, I had upgraded it to the “Planet” package ($9/mo) because of performance.

I just moved ultramookie.com and mookie.xyz back to Cloudflare. Vercel is cool, but Cloudflare Pages offers something Vercel doesn’t: Unlimited bandwidth for mysite. I doubt I’d ever use up 100GB of network transfer on Vercel, but if I can live without a ceiling, I will.

Fediverse / Mastodon

Since late last year, probably August or September 2022’ish, I was having a blast building and tearing down Fediverse instances based on different server software – Mastodon, GoToSocial and Akkoma. There were a couple of instances that survived longer than others, but for the most part, the instances were all short lived experiments. I had built and torn down Fediverse instances a few years ago and those did not last either. At the end of the day, I work in the industry and while this stuff is fun for a bit, managing something long term feels like work.

I tore down my recent Mastodon instance yesterday and signed up for mastohost yesterday for the “Moon” plan which should support two people – or just one heavy user like me. This new instance is orangebunny.net and this will be my long-term Fediverse presence. I still plan on building and playing, but those will strictly be for fun.

Find me on the Fediverse (or as the news calls it: Mastodon) at @mookie@orangebunny.net

Static Site Hosting

I have been happily using Cloudflare Pages to build and host ultramookie.com. But, while playing with the Fediverse servers, I found that I have most of my eggs in one basket: Cloudflare. That includes domain registration, DNS and hosting.

While having everything at Cloudflare is convenient, I wanted to find alternative service providers for the different parts of my empire (heh). It would be good to have some diversity in the services that I am using.

I originally wanted to try Vercel and see what the process was like to build and host a site. But wow, the onboarding process was so dead simple that I went ahead and moved ultramookie.com over the Vercel to see how it performs.