Although OpenShift is a great service and fit all my needs completely, I decided to move on. There were several reasons for that. First of all, I wanted to have a more independent setup, bringing closer the day when I can run my own server reliably. OS being an IAAS applies certain restrictions on what you can and cannot do. Secondly, I hit the limit of three cartridges provided by free, and while it was just the amount I required, it prohibited me from doing any casual testing and web-doodling from that account. And when the money becomes involved, you apply a more careful judgment to where you wanna be.
So farewell Openshift, greetings DigitalOcean. I picked DO mostly for, I won't conceal it, the price tag. $5 is the exact amount I'm willing to spend on a VPS so far, when there is also an option of not paying at all. And for these $5 DigitalOcean provides a decent single-core VPS with 20GB SSD storage space. This is more than enough for me right now, and DO offers more advanced plans for roughly the same amount of money as other VPS providers do. I opted for an instance in San-Francisco (Amsterdam was unavailable when I was creating an instance), and that gives me around 150 ms latency — which is sufficient for my use-cases.
Initial configuration
As soon as DO gets your payment, you are eligible for creating a node (nodes are called droplets here). You pick a physical location, and the operating system to install on the droplet (I went for LTS Ubuntu) and in half a minute your droplet is ready. Boom.
I used this article to perform basic configuration and ensure some first-minute security. DigitalOcean also offers a fair bunch of tutorials on how to install common software on different distributions, how to configure SSL in Apache and so on.
Following one of the above-mentioned tutorials, I installed and configured the LAMP stack. Never dealing with Apache in my life, I found it relatively easy to get it running, HTTPS included. There were a few not so smooth moments because Apache config layout is apparently distro-dependent, so you should search for documentation for your particular distribution.
MySQL was fairly easy to get up since I already did that a couple of times. I also installed Phusion Passenger (from what I've understood, it's an application container for Ruby) directed by another guide on the web. And that was all for the software part.
Finally, I obtained a valid and widely accepted SSL certificate from StartSSL. This tutorial explains the process step-by-step. StartSSL offers free certificates for your main domain and one subdomain. It seems like they also require you to verify your identity every month, but I'm yet to find out.
Migrating sites and applications
Of course, the blog (which is just a statically generated website) was the easiest to migrate. On the other hand, the commenting system gave me a lot of trouble. I couldn't get the damn thing to work because of the build errors, and I had to contact on of the maintainers on Github to help me with that. Turned out that Ruby 1.9 and 2.0 compatibility has its quirks the same as Pythons do (it was news for me). After I fixed versions in a few dependency lines, it all went good.
Finally, I transitioned my ownCloud server. That perhaps was the main reason to move to a VPS — I wanted to keep my data a little closer, and all in one place. Now I use the 20GB I was provided with to store my photos, books and random files I move across devices. I also tried to store music (ownCloud has a web audio player and even a Ampache server to stream music), but at that point ownCloud upload speed was just terrible (and I wasn't able to make ownCloud recognize the files I manually copied via scp), so I gave up on that idea. I hope it is fixed by now, though I haven't tried since.
Besides data, ownCloud also keeps my contacts and calendars. I had to spend a couple of bucks on CalDAV and CardDAV clients for Android (which is such a shame, even iPhones have native Cal/CardDAV support), but it pretty much worth it. Now I don't rely on Google for managing that information, but it is still nicely synchronized between all my devices (and the Web interface for them is also rather good).
By the way, ownCloud is modular, so all kinds of plugins for it are written and being written to meet the needs of every user. Its community also greatly benefited from the recent PRISM scandal. Thus If you write in PHP and are worried about your data safety, you can join the cause.
Blog updates
It is apparent that I spend more time tweaking the blog than actually writing, but I really can't help it. This time I worked on the sidebar and added a pair of widgets there (Web 1.0 galore). You can see them on the index page. The first one is a Goodreads widgets that shows the latest books I've finished reading. The second is a Jamendo widget which allows you to listen to the music I discovered recently. Give it a try, it is free as in freedom.
Currently I'm also trying to replace the Google Analytics suite with a personally hosted software called Piwik. That will be another step in stripping the vendor-locked parts in my setup.
To summarize it all, join us now and share the software! You'll be free, hackers, if you decide to.