Move My Blog Hosting to DigitalOcean App Platform

Digital Ocean App Platform is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering that allows publishing code directly to DigitalOcean servers, without managing any infrastructure.

I created a Github repo that contains my site’s static files, generated from my Hugo static site generator, and I followed this guide to automatically deploy to Digital Ocean’s free tier for static sites each time I push to my repo’s main branch.

It seems DigitalOcean is essentially doing the same thing I did with Fargate; putting my files into container(s), and pushing them into a VM, or, more likely, some serverless setup, with DNS and certs all handled.

Fargate Costs

Granted, Fargate wasn’t the right technology fit for my static website. I deployed my site to Fargate just to check it out, and also so I could build all the required components with Terraform.

AWS’s premise is that if I jump through its many hoops, and implement its oft complicated and poorly documented tooling and infra, it will tuck my technology into whatever corner of its vast enterprise that best suits its cost structure.

Sure, AWS has options that are cheaper than Fargate, for a little static site like mine. And, it’s not surprising that building a static site in Fargate turned out to be a bit of a boondoggle. But $50 / month, when I do all the work? I’m left with the same sense I’ve always had about AWS: What’s good for AWS is not necessarily good for the rest of us.

Presumably, at some (traffic level) * (price point), Fargate is a good option for deploying a set of high traffic / low management services, but these hourly costs for VPCs and ECS vCPUs, even at pennies or fractions of pennies per hour, strike me as comical:

Projected cost for my static site on Fargate is around $50 / month:

This is due to $0.01 / hour costs for VPCs, and lower, but still fixed, hourly costs for vCPU for ECS:

At some point, I plan to move my blog over to Google Cloud Run, and also try Google API Gateway, just to figure out how it works. I took advantage of a Google program that issued me $300 in Google Cloud credits, so stay tuned!