Why?
Over the last 4-6 years I’ve had various projects pursued without much success: slimthiqrecords.com, outsociede.com, various blogs. Each of these was more specific in its vision, which led to abandonment as I switched focuses in my personal life. Clearly, I need a long-term project to serve as a creative outlet. “noahp.info” will be much broader in scope. This may prevent me from effectively building up an audience, but I hope that you’ll pop in for one topic or another and check out a second topic.
Another important facet of having such a project is to build a portfolio. I’ve put a lot a time and energy into creative pursuits such as music production, photography, and video editing. Additionally, I don’t have any projects which I can use as evidence of my networking skills, or ability to architect on the cloud. This site serves both of these purposes.
This site has the potential to make money, but it’s pure cost at this point – albeit, 4 to 5 dollars a month with a yearly domain charge isn’t much of a cost. It would be amazing to be a year or two down the road and have consistent revenue streams through affiliate links, but ultimately that goal is secondary to the purpose highlighted above.
The Future:
This site currently sits on a basic Amazon Lightsail instance. There’s not enough traffic (or for that matter, content) to justify load balancing the instance or deploying it via Content Delivery Network (CDN). The scope of this project will change over time.
Given enough time and traffic, I’d like to continue to evolve this site by adding database connections to RDS, rather than using the native PHP of WordPress on the instance itself. I’d like to deploy via CDN and protect the website via AWS WAF. The cost just doesn’t make sense at this point. Building out this website from scratch provides me the opportunity to learn skills which can only be obtained from really getting into the weeds of configuration at an individual resource level.
I’m also working with some friends on similar projects and want to host their blogs on the same architecture. With 2 or 3 sites on WordPress multisite, the cost for the services mentioned above starts to make more sense.
Obviously, there’s a thousand easier ways to host a blog – what’s the fun in that?
Anyway, thanks for stopping in. I hope you’ll reach out if you find yourself curious in the project.
Best,
Noah P.
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