Free or Not to Free

So when starting this blog I took some common principles in mind and that is associated with economies of scale. Right now this blog is small and has pretty much no viewers outside of my wife and kids so spending a lot of money for dedicated servers and whatnot makes zero sense. However, a lot of individuals make applications thinking its going to start servicing tens of thousands of users. When that does not happen you are left with a bill that hurts you and in a lot of cases makes you give up and shut everything down. Instead, you build small and scale up. This seems like commonsense but it actually is not (well at least depending on your perspective).

To start any project, or business you have to start small. Find the product you are trying to either make or sell and then scale upwards from there. Like for example, if you wanted to get into wood working and have never done it before you don’t start by tackling redoing all the cabinets in your kitchen. That’s a big job and depending how things go you will most likely give up and just end up paying someone else to do it instead. Where if you would have started small like making a picture frame and scaling up you get more familiar with the process starting with simple tools and then scaling. You don’t need expensive tools to make something simple a lot of basic hand tools will help you get the job done.

Does that get you your initial desired outcome? No it does not but that’s not entirely the point. The point is to work your way up to your desired outcome and smash past it. So in the case of the blog, I am starting small using Github Pages 🔗 and an $11 domain to host things statically (honestly you don’t always need server side rendering), and going from there. My goal again talking about in my Intro is to eventually write a book and this blog is to help me get some things out there while covering other aspects of the technology.

If the traffic to the blog scales then I can scale with it but the next step is not necessarily going to one of the major cloud providers like AWS 🔗. There are plenty of host providers out there and even when it comes to containerized workloads Railway 🔗, or Vultr 🔗 make more sense. The same applies to databases but there are other requirements like availability, redundancy etc. I do miss Linode 🔗

So with whatever project you are working on especially the first time take things small. Work your way up as only consistency and repetition makes you better and always be curious to try different approaches as you don’t want your learning to stagnate. This is also why overly relying on AI to give you an answer will hurt you in the long run (I know I am teasing about the topic we will get there).

Anyways till next time. Take care! Bishop out!