Like clockwork, that bill for around $30 per month. It’s only two or three t2.micro instances at the most these days, but for what?

It was a larger presence in the past, and the expense was comparatively small to generate proof-of-concept demonstrations and to add short-term resources to projects. For now, though, it’s a skeletal presence: just the minimum to keep an always-available service or two running and piping a few other things to the backend for handling… and, frankly, a few of those things in the back of the DMZ fridge are starting to smell a little ripe when applying the sparks-joy sniff test.

I decided to take a chance with Linode, duplicating one AWS VPS’ services over to a Linode VPS running alongside it. It wasn’t to be a simple imaging or the like; rather, it would be a piece-by-piece fresh installation, streamlined with all the lessons learned and without all the accumulated cruft of trial and error, upgrades, outdated versions, and so forth. If it works and its running doesn’t exceed some limits, the one AWS VPS will be decommissioned and I’ll have another pound of coffee beans in the bank for each month.

And then, in a blink, the weekend was gone, and if I was sucessful thus far, this gopher post is visible on both servers, the reader none the wiser.

DNS, VPN (OpenVPN to wireguard), a custom-build of nginx for the reverse proxying, xmpp, irc, static serving of apps and files used in backend services, the firewall rules and the routing tables, the certificate work, security measures, … and there’s still a bit of work to do, particularly with a domain I structured with a lot of https://domain/app mounts rather than app.domain

Does any of that matter? Probably not – not in any grand achievement or furthering progress or the like, anyway. Instead, there’s a maybe usefull insight into where I wander off to while sleepwalking through a waking dream.

Is the occassional lesson in self-awareness worth all the grey hair? How about with that extra $5-10 a month in savings?

Who knows?