You may have read about my game dev adventures as I built my business over 6 years (Ker-Chunk – ker-chunk.com), or worked with me in various places (Thrust Interactive, AWS, Zynga). During the last 20 years, there’s one thing that has stayed hilariously consistent.
Why is it always during career downtime, whether it’s after some layoff or between games, one finds a reason to create yet-another-website? I’ve built websites since the mid-90s with my first go on Homestead. A few of us went on to build Geocities-yahoo-xanga-maybe-neopets experiences (or all of them). Then WordPress came out. B2evolution tried, but alas, WordPress has become somewhat of a sticking point. There are still many CMSes now, but even in my adventures exploring CMSes I still come back to WordPress. Complain all you will about vulns, but some of the largest enterprises in the world use WordPress. It’s not going anywhere.
With this in mind, I finally did it. I tried Amazon Lightsail in an effort to avoid the expenses of WP engine and lean into my AWS background. When it comes to spending my own money on infrastructure, I’m now: Cheap.
Lightsail is fascinating – it’s weirdly simple for those who have ever played in cloud infrastructure, and yet not nearly as complex as WP Engine or trying to deploy WordPress on, something wild and unnecessary like Kubernetes.
Amazon Lightsail has a tutorial to get started building a WordPress website but you have to SSH into an instance to get your Bitnami password. So even if I want to lie and tell you it’s stupid simple, I can’t. Past me knows that any regular person will look at that and think “I need a cloud certification” or at minimum a willingness to break things. Many who want to spin up a blog just…want… to spin up… a blog. I wonder who is the target demographic. Ex-Amazonians?
It fits my niche so I can’t complain. I appreciate that it is cheaper and I’m supremely lazy when it comes to these things now – primarily because I appreciate the complexity that comes from managing infrastructure as my day job.
Someone else can do it for me, or at least most of it, in my off hours.
