Our oceansound demo was running on a Digital Ocean droplet because free PaaS alternatives weren't really viable. We extract timeseries from MODIS data with an old version of PyHDF that still supports HDF4 and needed about 4GB for data itself, so we deployed it and paid US$ 5/month. It really wasn't expensive and performance was good, but we don't have any income with this project so it would be better if we could avoid costs and don't be restricted by our lack of infrastructure.
Not anymore.
Two weeks ago Jesse Noller tweeted that Rackspace was offering free cloud accounts for OSS projects. Hmm. I sent him an email and he replied quickly, offering us a new home.
After following his instructions and be amazed by The Fanatical Support (first time someone called me right after sign up) last monday I started the migration. When I deployed the demo to Digital Ocean I tried to avoid as much as possible to do things by hand and automated the process with Ansible. This time I adapted scripts to follow best practices and started a security role, and everything went smoothly.
But the best part is that I have more resources available, and I set up a Jenkins builbot. First test was to deploy this blog to Cloud Files automatically, and I found a tutorial explaining how to make it work as a static site. You're reading this, so it is working.
All in all, we are extremely satisfied with the experience, and we can't recommend Rackspace enough. Great work!
Category: Blog
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