From DreamHost to DigitalOcean
I've been a professional web developer for upwards of two decades now, which means that people pay me money, usually a healthy amount of it, to, well, make web applications. And I'd like to think I'm pretty good at it. People keep hiring me, and no one's ever fired me, at least.
But I have a dark secret, and that's that, throughout my entire career, I have, purely by chance, avoided having to deploy anything, or at least work to deploy anything, which means that when people say stuff like "reverse proxy," my response has typically been to nod sagely and sometimes respond with something very clever like, "yes, indeed, much better than an upside-down proxy." I used to work with a guy whose solution to every problem was, "I'll come up with a plan involving no fewer than forty-six interconnected AWS services that'll solve this," even when the problem was like, "hang on, my headphone cable is caught under my chair wheel again," and I always found that rather intimidating and stupid. Mostly stupid.
Years ago, this site used to be a Django app that I deployed on DreamHost by, *sigh*, using FileZilla to copy all my code over and then SSHing into the box to type pkill python. How did the website even work on the internet? I dunno! DreamHost had a couple files you could copy-paste to make Django apps work. That was good enough for me.
But then DreamHost did something that made Django apps -- or my Django app, at least -- not work anymore, so I let the site die and forgot about it for awhile, until I realized I was still paying ten bucks a month for...nothing. So like a discount Netflix subscription, basically. I like having my tiny little corner of the internet, though, so I rebuilt the site as a tiny .NET Core MVC app and deployed it on a very inexpensive DigitalOcean droplet.
And...it wasn't bad, at all. And I learned a bunch of stuff I should've learned probably twenty years ago, like "When you ChatGPT 'How do I get to a internet site?' and follow the instructions and the Internet Man at Verizon or wherever sends your desire to visit the internet site to the right IP address, how is the internet site always running? Doesn't it ever turn off?" I even learned why it's called a "reverse proxy," but I'm taking that secret to the grave with me.