Goodbye Google!

This is my first post on my new hosting system, DigitalOcean.  I happened to go look at my Google Console last night and saw that my Google Cloud SQL had run up $30 in the past few day. It completely blew through my credits and it is now the most expensive thing in my stack. Everything else was just using cents per day, while the SQL server was taking dollars. It was simply not affordable. Instead, I did some research and decided to go with DigitalOcean.

At first, it was confusing, since a Laravel app deployment with a MySQL database attached was costing me close to $60/month, which was also insane.  Until I found that you can get a “Droplet” server for about $4/month. A Droplet server is different in the sense that, instead of giving you an application container with everything set up, they give you a full, empty Ubuntu Linux server that you can use anyway you want.  This is probably meant for advanced users, as setting up a Linux server from scratch is not an easy thing, But seeing as I do this for work on the regular, I wasn't too scared.

So I went ahead and got an instance, bought a cheap SSL cert and installed a LAMP server in this new Linux Droplet. I had it running in about 3 hours.

So now I have my system in my new host, costing me $8/month (I increased the specs) and running smoothly. Now, there still some config that I will need to fix, as al of my uploaded files are being saved in a Google Storage Bucket, but those don't cost that much, so I have some time to upgrade them.

Obviously, this is not a coding update, but a short server update, so I'll just end it here.