After many years of being a member of the Hellyeah! family, we’ve recently been given notice that the rack in which our server has been hosted is being retired at the end of March. The guys who run the rack just can’t justify the $900/month it costs to run the rack anymore. It’s been a good run and it’s been nice having a dedicated server in a low latency data center for years, but it’s also been a hassle at times. As Emory put it so well in his email to us all about the rack closure:

{% blockquote Emory Lundberg %} These days virtualization of systems and remote management has made racking our own equipment not only exceptionally costly (by the kindness of others we have largely been immune to these costs) but inconvenient as well since we aren’t young nerds with all the time in the world for hobbies and fixing computers in the middle of the night. {% endblockquote %}

Since I update this blog so infrequently, I’ve always been a fan of statically generated site content. I’ve run Moveable Type for the last ten years and it’s done quite well for me. As an information security professional, I was always worried about vulnerabilities in MT, of which there have been a few, but not so many as in WordPress. With this move into S3, I removed the last bit of attack surface for this site. I’m now using Octopress to generate the site content and jekyll-s3 to push it into S3.

So, it’s done now. Fairly painless. The hardest part was editing all my old posts that I imported from MT to standardize the random collection of paths where my post images lived.