Yes, you’re right. The last article I wrote was in October 2023. Why did it take so long? Am I broke now from running this blog?
If you follow ThePrimeagen and Fireship, you should be aware of the madness when it comes to serverless and cloud computing bills.
Fortunately, the sudden stop of new articles is due to other work that pays my bills. But how can I operate a tiny blog like Technopolis.tv for 1,247.60 per month?
On top of that is the fact that the blog remains ad and sponsor free (donations are welcome). So how can I spend that ridiculous amount for something insignificant like this?
Yes, you guessed it right! I click baited you. The currency I’m talking about is not USD!
I just googled quickly for currencies with really bad rates, but decided that the Iranian Rial (378900.00﷼) and Vietnamese Dong (228690.00₫) wouldn’t be believable enough for this little prank.
Since I host my server in Iceland, I decided to use Iceland’s currency ISK (Icelandic Króna).
So, what does it really cost you to operate Technopolis.tv?
It’s around 9 USD monthly for VPS + Domain. Yes, Gen-Z… you read it right. Only 9 USD per month.
Since privacy is a big thing for me, everything is paid anonymously and securely via Monero.
No Credit Cards, no hidden costs, no tracking, no personal data. Yes, something like that still exists and I’m very happy about that.
But, what about the hardware specs of your Server?
To be honest, it’s nothing crazy. I run Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTS on a virtual server with 1GB RAM on a single CPU and 25GB for Storage with a bandwidth traffic limited to 1TB a month.
I have full root access to my VPS and I’m managing everything myself.
No cloud, container, kubernetes, serverless or <insert_buzzword_or_new_javascript_framework_name_here> nonsense.
Then how does Technopolis.tv work under the hood?
In the early 2000s, the majority of webmasters build their websites statically. You basically wrote one HTML file, duplicated it, change the content accordingly and uploaded all the HTML files via FTP to your Webserver.
This was cumbersome and you needed to change every single HTML file if you want to correct a little typo in the header or footer of the website.
If you were lucky to know basics in PHP programming (or C, PERL or BASH via CGI) and found a free Webhoster that supported PHP, you cracked the jackpot!
Now you could include() the header.php, sidebar.php and footer.php dynamically into one index.php file.
PHP and your webserver would take care of the rest and produce one static HTML file and serve it to your web visitors.
Btw, did I mention that I ❤️ PHP?
Cool story Grandpa, how you do it today?
I combine the advantages of static and dynamic websites. Over time I gave up designing Websites myself. That’s why I search for a nice HTML Template, (called Themes) that works with Jekyll.
Jekyll is a static site generator. It does via Ruby locally what PHP would do on your webserver. It generates static HTML files and all you need to do is, to move the output folder to your webserver.
I use nginx as webserver and rsync to upload only the changed files to the VPS.
That’s basically it…
… and it’s blazingly fast!