In 2015, due to a series of events, I began a journey across the globe where I lived out of two bags for eleven months. In May of 2017, I left my full time job and started another journey, this time driving across the US. It’s been several months since I started this new minimalist adventure, and it’s not been entirely what I expected. I’ve seen a lot of amazing friends and family. I’ve had a couple of setbacks. I’ve struggled with people, relationships and burnout. My journey is not quite over, but I’ve already learned a considerable amount about myself, people and America.
The Daily Stormer, a website with highly controversial hate speech, was recently scrubbed from the Internet. This wasn’t due to government censorship or illegal content, but due to the fact that no private hosting provider would allow their content. DigitalOcean and DreamHost refused to host their content in 2014. In August of 2017, CloudFlare terminated their CDN services for the website. GoDaddy terminated their domain registration with a 24 hour warning. The site owners migrated to Google Domains, which also refused to allow the domain transfer. NameCheap refused to allow them to register a domain as well.
What is interesting about this situation is the Daily Stomer carried only content. Although legally protected as free speech, at least in the US, hosting and infrastructure providers are free to refuse service to any company. Many of the companies mentioned above quoted specific clauses in their terms of service about hate speech or inciting violence. On its surface, it seems like these tech companies are helping to make it difficult to host hateful content on the Internet. However, with such a limited set of providers and domain registration services on the Internet, does the dominance of such few companies in the hosting space allow the means for industry to decide what content is allowable? Are Google, GoDaddy and others effectively censoring opinions they find disagreeable?
“I only dance when I’ve been drinking,” is one of those phrases every social dancer had heard when attempting to encourage a friend to come learn how to dance. It’s not the same as saying, “I don’t dance,” which is a mere acknowledgment that dancing is something one does not enjoy (or thinks they will not enjoy). To qualify the necessity for alcohol often implies that one may like to express oneself through movement, but has difficulty dealing with the self-perceived embarrassment. Such people may fear allowing themselves to feel silly, unless they are under the influence of a substance that can reduce that anxiety. But learning to be silly, together and fully aware, and to move our bodies to music in ways that evoke powerful emotions of love and life, can grant people a freedom to create and enjoy the art form known as dancing.
No one enjoys changing hosting providers. I haven’t had to often, but when I have, it involved manual configuration and copying files. As I’m looking to deploy some new projects, I’m attempting to automate the provisioning process, using hosting providers with Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to automatically create virtual machines and run Ansible playbooks on those machines. My first attempt involved installing DC/OS on DigitalOcean which met with mixed results.
In this post, I’ll be examining Bee2, a simple framework I built in Ruby. Although the framework is designed to be expandable to different providers, initially I’ll be implementing a provisioner for Vultr, a new hosting provider that seems to be competing directly with DigitalOcean. While their prices and flexibility seem better than DigitalOcean’s, their APIs are a mess of missing functions, poll/waiting and interesting bugs.
Back in 2013, a startup known as Cloud at Cost attempted to run a hosting service where users paid a one-time cost for Virtual Machines (VMs). For a one-time fee, you could get a server for life. I had purchased one of these VMs, intending to use it as a status page. However, their service has been so unreliable that it’s a shot in the dark as to whether a purchased VM will be available from week to week. Recent changes to their service policy are attempting to recoup their losses through a $9 per year service fee. It’s a poor attempt to salvage a bad business model from a terrible hosting provider.
At a dinner table, a chap complains about 9am meetings with team members on the other side of the country, and how these early morning meetings, every workday for a year, feel draining and endless. A women is indignant at the chap’s hardship, and mentions her hour long commute in the mornings, followed by an hour commute in the evenings, often working ten hour days. Yet another lad, not to be outdone in complaints about work, challenges them all with how he must be at the station yard, every morning at 5am, prepared to drive bus routes for the remainder of his day with its constant flow of thankless commuters. We often exemplify our hardships in regards to our careers, sometimes to the extent of suggesting that our friends don’t have it as bad as we do.
I used to work at the University of Cincinnati and whenever I got frustrated at staff meetings, I’d threaten to move to Australia. After a $300 application fee and a surprisingly short approval process, I had holiday work visa which allowed me to live and work in Australia for a full year. My manager led me to our director’s office. With my resignation letter on his desk, my director simply asked, “Do you want more money?” to which I responded, “I’m moving to Australia.” There were confused looks from the two of them, awkward silence and finally, “No, really … I’m moving to Australia.” It was the first time I had left the relative security of a full-time position, and it wouldn’t be the last.
Newer