[TriLUG] An AWS Story....

[Steve Litt via TriLUG]

Dwain Sims via TriLUG said on Fri, 8 Aug 2025 12:01:10 -0400

>https://www.seuros.com/blog/aws-deleted-my-10-year-account-without-warning/
>
>https://www.seuros.com/blog/aws-restored-account-plot-twist/

I find it unbelieveable that the author of these two entries *still*
has his stuff on AWS. This time it came out mostly OK, but what about
next time, and the time after that? If a corporation, company,
enterprise, business, or individual proves themselves dangerous, you
separate yourself from them as quickly as possible.

I don't have nearly as much code or data as the author, but I keep the
standard version of all my stuff on my computer, with my hand made
backups, onsite and offsite. Nothing short of a hydrogen bomb will
knock me out of the box.

Four times in 20 years, the web hosts hosting Troubleshooters.Com have
imploded. 

Pacifinet=>Bluehost=>Affordablehost=>Futurequest=>Shockhosting

I'm still with Shockhosting.

Pacificnet downsized into incapability.

Bluehost just kept getting shittier.

Affordablehost got sold to clowns who fired the old crew and started
doing things "a new way". A month later Troubleshooters.com looked like
an old style TV with no horizontal or vertical sweep (a single point),
and attempts to fix were a series of emailed excuses.

Futurequest was an excellent Florida web host that experienced too many
hurricanes, ran in the red, and had to close after giving us all plenty
of warning.

I'm still using Shockhosting, and they're great.

Every time, I just made a tarball of Troubleshooters.Com, grabbed a new
web host, pointed my dns there, sftp'ed my tarball to the web host, and
via ssh untarred it. Folks "in the know" criticize my static content,
saying I should have my static content in a database so it could be
modified and added to without sftp. But you know what? Doing a quick web
host switch takes me, a single person who isn't even an admin, maybe 2
days.

If I get run over by a train, one of my kids could take over
Troubleshooters.Com instantly, and all they'd need to learn besides
HTML and CSS is Paypal buttons plus a tiny bit of Javascript. If the
original author of a "dynamic website" gets hit by a truck, a unicorn
is needed to take over.

Here's a question: When you take a backup of an AWS backup of your
site, how the heck do you test it for restorability? For completeness?

I know I'm comparing apples with oranges, but maybe this story presents
a great reason to use the simpler oranges, even if it's soooooo 1996.

By the way, I'm considering creating my first internet (not http/html)
server, probably in Rust. If I do it, it will be simple as hell, by
design.

SteveT

Steve Litt 

http://444domains.com