SpellBinding News

This is the next-gen spellbining via fornax. Try it -- it will become mainstreamed when I get the new server up (see more below)

I've been dealing with life for a bit, and now am getting back to 'work'... Much to be done soon.

My AWS server has been running very nicely, but ~$12 per month seems a little excessive, considering I am using maybe 1/100 of 1%... I can at least move to something around $5.00, which is easier to justify. I suppose I am being petty as it doesn´t make any difference in my finances really, but it irks me.

I have about 3 months of free credits left.

Likewise I rushed into using ddns for my DNS resolver, and it is not working out. It's free, but I have to log into their website and click a button every month for it to continue. Does not seem like much, but there is a 1-week window to do so. Knowing myself, there is no way I can keep this going -- I will forget to do that, and just thinking about that makes me nervous. So that's a hard pass, and I will have to give you a new URL when that change happens...

Oracle has a free hosting plan, with similar kind of limitation that you have to use a certain amount of compute to keep it (weird?). People rig time-wasting code on cron to automate this waste of cycles, but it made me kind of nervous. And anyway they for some reason would not accept my credit card -- I put it in 3 times and waited for an email confiriming the transaction -- nothing. In the end I gave up, but they continued sending me emails requesting my driver's licence etc. To heck with them.

I briefly considered Google, as they have free or nearly-free plan, but the last thing I want in my life is to give Google more information for my dossier...

On the positive side, my code has been super-stable and required no fixes in a few months now.

Nov 22 · 3 weeks ago

2 Comments ↓

@stack thanks for the heads up! Please post the notice on the SpellBinding gemini page when you get it figured out (in case I miss it here).

If you want suggestions re hosting I recommend looking at smaller hosting providers. RamNode has been fantastic for my smaller servers that I run. They're inexpensive ($3-$5/mo for 512M-1G VPS) and customer services is really good. They had a minor router misconfiguration after an upgrade and they spent 3 hours with me trying to make sure my nothingth of a VPS could automatically get an IP address.

Thanks again for hosting SpellBinding!

I jumped the gun a few days ago and got a 2G VPS from dinu for just under $4/mo... Seems good and they also provide free DDNS with no monthly confirmation bullshit.

@ingrix, thanks and I will absolutely keep everyone posted.

In fact I will announce the new location as a beta shortly, and deprecate the current site with a good overlap.