I am so excited to officially launch my new blog site! After many years of contemplating potential ideas for what to post, I am happy to announce I have a lot of interesting stuff in the works.
So far I am very proud to say that this website is officially running on a FreeBSD setup that I’ve custom tailored for specifically this blog site.
I couldn’t have done this without AWS and their Free Tier EC2 instance. I didn’t have pay a dime to use this and I got provisioned a server with 1GB of RAM, and 1vCPU. Installing FreeBSD further reduces the footprint considerably in comparison to if I just simply went with Ubuntu Server. I’m going to try and optimise this as much as possible. I just initially installed WordPress. Unfortunately the biggest resource hog is the MySQL server, but I think I could optimise this further.
At some point I may pay for hosting, but I think it’s a good challenge to try and optimise the software you have first so it runs efficiently without the extra bloat. Also I am a developer and I enjoy writing code. 🙂
I have a few ideas up my sleeve for reducing the resource footprint even further.
- I could try reducing the MySQL reserve pool for reducing memory consumption.
- Install a caching plugin to reduce the need for the server to re-generate HTML files upon each request.
- Develop a custom theme that is performant with little footprint (though this is normally to save bandwidth)
- Make sure the asset loads from an S3 bucket (but potentially costing money if I need more than 5GB from the Free Tier)
There is possibly even more options for optimisations but I may never know those ones unless I go digging even further. (Maybe even run NetBSD but I might be going a bit too overboard there)