After my recent problems with the phone company’s new fiber network and its restrictive modem, I decided to look for a VPS for my hosting needs.
I began by considering solutions like Neocities. But actually I have had my fill of shared hosting providers, and economically it absolutely makes sense to prefer a VPS. I have done it a couple of times before over the years. The one I have now picked is Kamatera – mainly because I saw they are cheap and have servers in Israel. Their lowest cost is currently $4, which gives a server with 1 MB of RAM + 20 GB of file space. That should be more than enough for my modest needs, and the cost is about the same as what the phone company charges for a permanent IP.
At Kamatera it was possible to use a server image that already included a LAMP installation and Phpmyadmin, so that was convenient. For now I need only PHP.
I learned a new word today, “KISS” – someone coined it to refer to simplicity as a software principle, and that well describes what I’m trying to do: to always choose the simplest solution and as close as possible to what I, with my lack of tech knowhow, can have a hope of getting my head around. It certainly won’t always mean using the best tool for the job, but will be the closest to what I understand. Modern languages and advanced frameworks will often get the job done in a better way. But on various occasions I have had difficulty with some of these. Sometimes there will be dependency problems, or inconsistencies between versions that are difficult to sort out. So, whereas the software application itself may be elegant and simple, the framework that supports it may be complex.
In general, whenever a software developer boasts about his product’s beautiful simplicity and ease of use, I have learned to take that with a lot of salt. The 2-minute installation will take hours to get working because he didn’t factor in my stupidity, evidently.
We are living in an age – fortunately – where we can create amazing, beautiful websites with almost no technical skills. And we can opt into networks like Tumblr or Blogger or WordPress where everything is done for us. My attempts to avoid these platforms look stuborn, almost ludicrous by comparison, and the results are unimpressive, old-fashioned and primitive. I spend hours to obtain something that can be done in a few seconds otherwise.
But on the other hand, without being a trained programmer or developer, I am doing things my own way and am closer to being in control of the tools that I use. That’s the extent of my aspiration. And hopefully to do some nice things with these tools.
I don’t want to be too much of a Luddite (I know, that’s a term that is wrongly used) Wired has an interesting article about OpenAI and the growing use of artificial intelligence in writing code. It’s a pity that Microsoft got their clutches on it, but I can really see how this could change everything. It has potential like the Internet, like Guttenberg, to empower ordinary people. On the other hand, in trying to explain its value to my wife, I was unable to come up with many good examples to prove my point.