Site Updates 1-8-22

If you don’t already know, our website is hosted on a Google Cloud Ubuntu virtual machine, then passed through Cloudflare as it provides high performance, high reliability, and is easy to keep backups of the website in case anything ever happens. Yes, it’s a bit more costly than any cheap VPS, but it’s worth  having things such as automatic snapshots of the disk, full management from anywhere, and more.

Recently, I learned about Google Cloud’s ‘balanced disk’ tier, which is right smack between the ‘standard disk’ and ‘full SSD’ tier. It’s more expensive than the standard disk, but it’s a lot faster. And it’s cheaper than a full SSD, which in my opinion isn’t needed for this website. The extra cost per month is about $6 for a 75GB balanced disk. The standard disk was provisioned at 50GB, which costs approximately $2.00/month. I increased the storage amount when doing the changeover to future-proof any extra needed storage for our future articles, and for even more increased performance. Google Cloud disk performance scales with size. This means for everyone here, loading times should be near instant now compared to before.