Three years ago, my friend Rob let me know he was shutting down his personal server, where Two Ideas lived, and that I needed to find somewhere else to host it. (Thanks, Rob, for letting me use your server for so many years!)

I moved to hosting on AWS, for a couple of reasons. First, I knew how to administer Linux systems, and running Linux on AWS was easy. Second, the first year on the “free tier” was absurdly cheap. Third, I didn’t know a whole lot about AWS, and it seemed like a good opportunity to learn.

What did I learn?

Not as much about AWS as I’d intended; it was too easy and reasonable to run my box like any other Linux server. I learned far more about AWS and automation in my one year at Context Relevant than in three years of running this blog in the cloud.

But I did learn some other things.

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