The DIY Approach: How I Hosted My Website from Scratch - The Plan

I always wanted to host my own website just for kicks and giggles !! But also wanted to have total control without much investment. This was not possible with any web hosting services that are around. These services are expensive and moreover I'm in exploring mode where I want to spend as little as possible yet have a expensive professional look on the website. 

I was looking for options like - 

• If I could host the website from my own laptop or 
• If I need to have a website hosing service. 

Then the custom domain, anyway I need to purchase that. There are plenty of vendors that sell domains. Buying a domain is as simple as buying a laptop from Amazon, if you know what specifications you want. 

Coming to the first approach - If I could host the website from my own laptop, I could have done that but security of my home network and the disadvantages out numbered the advantages:-

Advantage are

• There is no cost of additional infrastructure - just my laptop and the existing network !!
• I can have total control how and when I update my site
• I could take off when I feel I need to move on to next learning curve 

then the disadvantages:-

• I need to expose my IP to public - this opens "can of worms" for my network security, this alone out numbered every advantage. 
• my laptop needs to run uninterruptedly - I doubt this is possible 
• I need to learn how to expose my IP and then to protect it which puts my present agenda off the track  

My best bet was to try out some of the cloud services, and my immediate approach was Azure which gave a $200 credit and then Google Cloud again gave a similar credit but these amounts were not sufficient to explore what I'm looking for. I was looking for a bare minimum server configuration or at least a service that lets me host my site and expose the IP to public.

AWS was my next destination. May be my exploration with Azure and Google Cloud made AWS interface more easy to navigate or it is just better user interface. Here in AWS I came across 3 wonderful services that I could choose and use for my requirement. They are :

• AWS EC2
• AWS Lightsail
• AWS Amplify

I'll talk more about these in future, but for now my quest to host my site found a solution. 

In the next blog I'll talk about the domain services I used and the reasons behind choosing it and could it have been better if I opted for a different provider. 

Stay tuned !!!

The Switch from HDD to SDD - Improved Performance Speed

I’m still using a Lenovo T430 and I still love how modular it is when it comes to upgrade each of the components in the laptop. Though the upgrading has its limitations modular design is no seen in laptops that are available now. So, I stick with T430. If you want to buy this model laptop you can buy Lenovo T430 14-inch Laptop here. This model is not in production but you can buy from Amazon Renewed. Also, this laptop is at its lowest price at the moment, below is the price trend. 

Price Trend of T430(Renewed)

Back to the story!!

I was using a 500GB HDD that came with the T430 and it worked pretty well but recently it slowed down and I didn’t want to change from T430 yet. I did some research and thanks to its modular design I was able to upgrade the memory to approx. 1TB and also gained speed.

Here is what I did . . .

My laptop Lenovo T430 has a DVD drive which I have not used in ages. I wanted to replace it with my existing HDD and swap my old HDD with a new SDD. So, again I researched for a good SDD finally found that Zebronics - ZEB-SD52 SSD 512GB. Reasons to buy this are pretty straight forward The ZEB-SD52 SSD 512GB is a solid-state drive that uses QLC (Quad-Level Cell) technology, which allows for higher storage capacity at a lower cost. It also features both SATA II and SATA III interfaces, making it compatible with a wide range of devices.

I also bought Lapster Caddy for SSD and HDD, the size of DVD drive and the HDD are different so this caddy fits into DVD drive slot in the laptop and this accommodated my old HDD. Now the old HDD slot is used to accommodate new Zebronics - ZEB-SD52 SSD 512GB. 

Before performing the above steps I've cloned OS on my old HDD to new SDD. This process is totally a separate process which I'll cover in future blog. 

Boot speed of my laptop improved drastically, the difference is like night and day. I didn't expect performance of the laptop with the new SDD to change much but I was wrong, performance has improved many folds and I would say I'm more than happy that I made the switch from HDD to SDD. 

I still use my old HDD but as a secondary to store files that I don't access very often. 

After I made this change to my laptop, I helped one of my cousin to make a switch from HDD to SDD with ZEB-SD26 256 GB, used only 256GB as that laptop is already having more than 1TB HDD and the speed did improve very much. 

These two swiches from HDD to SDD made me realize that the advantages of using an SSD is that it can significantly improve the speed and performance of your computer or other devices. SSDs are much faster than traditional hard drives and can help to reduce boot times and improve file transfer speeds.