Hosting

Date: May 12 2018

Unsurprisingly, I use the cloud to host my website. Specifically, I use Microsoft Azure, the cloud that I help build. My website is serverful — there is a VM that I manage which serves the content. The actual site is not complicated. There is no server side processing. It is boring HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The benefit of the cloud is that the files actually live in Azure Files. It is no big deal if the VM gets nuked. I can mount the storage volume in a new VM. I would need to do a bit of configuration on the new VM but nothing too painful.

I might use ssh access to muck around but, at the end of the day, the machine is disposable. That's the benefit of the cloud.

First Update

Date: December 19 2022

I have moved away from Azure Files. I realized a long time ago that data disks was the correct solution for my intended use case. Indeed, I ran into the occasional problem with using Azure Files as a persistently mounted filesystem. The VM itself is still disposable. As long as I can keep the OS disk, then I do not need to do any bits of configuration on a "new" VM. Of course, the data disk gives me additional flexibility to detach my system's data from this VM and re-attach it to a new VM with a fresh OS disk. I should have moved off of Azure Files years ago.