Moved to Amazon AWS and Gallery3

If the site appears to load a little faster and pictures download a bit snappier that’s because I recently migrated from the web server under my desk to an Amazon AWS Micro Instance.

I’m still running Ubuntu, but it’s in “The Cloud”. It’s really awesome to have the loud webserver under my desk shut off. What’s even better is the static IP I’m getting for free.

The transition to AWS was mostly painless. I just had to remember all of my Apache Virtual Host config that I haven’t looked at in a few years, upload a bunch of data onto the new server into an EBS drive for my data partition, then update some entries in DNS.

Overall I’m happy with the AWS performance and so far it’s been free. Based on my calculations it’ll be a really low monthly fee for the amount of drive space I’m taking up with my pictures.

(EDIT: When I resize images I really notice the limited processor and RAM of the micro instance. Seems like my physical server (despite being 10 years old) resized images faster.)

I’m less happy with Gallery3. I converted from Gallery2 to Gallery3 and overall it shows some promise, but I’m just not impressed. Shockwave plugin freaks out when I try to upload through the web interface.

(EDIT: After switching to a wider and darker theme I’m feeling a bit better about Gallery3)

Maybe hosting your own images is anachronistic. I just haven’t found another way to do it that’s been immediately appealing. Anyone have thoughts on hosting images? (Don’t say Facebook).