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Do a Lot with a Little

I try to host anything I can at home.

That said, Internet services can be fickle. Home-based microservices can also be fickle. The more complicated the setup, the more difficult it can be to determine the reason for an outage. And if you're the admin at your house, and you aren't home? What are your loved ones to do when plex cuts out and the kids can't watch Bluey?

One day, I set out to establish some offsite monitoring. This would provide me some insight as to whether my house was lit up by my ISP at all. At least it's a starting point to determining whether I have a layer 2 problem or something beyond.

Initially I set up a "free" Google Cloud node. I'm not even still sure they offer those. The reason I abandoned it was because my free node generated a random bill for $6 one time.

Now you see, as a side note, I don't really care about the $6. I got a lot of value out of that little node. What I hate is variable usage-based billing with no caps, limits, guarantees or warnings. If I don't expect to get a bill for something and I get one, it doesn't matter if it's for five cents of fifty bucks. It's annoying. For business users, that might be the order of the day but as someone who already has a visceral loathing for the "everything as a subscription" model the capitalists seem to have foisted on us these days, adding uncertainty to it is a bridge too far.

Solutions in search of problems.

I'd been hearing about Linode from a prominent Linux YouTube personality I don't necessarily want to promote due to some stuff I literally just learned about them right now. Anyway, they aren't important to the topic. My conclusion was that Linode's flat $5 for a "nanode" - that is, a 1x CPU, 1GB mem, 25GB storage and a small amount of bandwidth - would be more than enough for my little monitoring cron job I had running on the Google thing. And so it was.

As a side note, I hear DigitalOcean has a droplet that's basically the same thing. I don't care about either company enough to evangelize one over the other, and it's not even the point of this meandering gemlog.

The point in fact is that those tiny 'nanode' type instances for your $5 can get you way, way more value than just a little monitoring server to keep track of your home network connection.

Now that I've been introduced to the smolweb / indieweb / whatever cute term we're using, I suddenly have a need for an Internet exposed instance that has very little overall value, and carries no additional expense beyond what I'm already spending. That same little node can host (in Docker!) a gemini server, a static web server, a finger daemon and a gopher server, all with no problem whatsoever. And due to the tiny sizes of the files it has to serve, 25GB of storage and a little bandwidth feels infinite in this tiny little slice of Internet.