I was playing around with my site today and realized that I hadn’t disclosed much about how it works. Here’s that nerd “look at my site architecture you guys” post.

If you couldn’t tell by the default theme, my blogging software of choice is Octopress, which generates my site’s HTML from Markdown. I use vim for most of my editing and do so on my Lenovo Thinkpad X220 running Ubuntu desktop. I use a tiling window manager called Awesome WM.

I also use Fastly for my caching layer. For the purposes of this dicussion, let’s just call Fastly “varnish as a service.”

Prior to today, I just used a single Linode in the Newark, NJ datacenter as my web server. The Linode runs Ubuntu server and serves static HTML with nginx.

As of today, though, I’m experimenting with Heroku US and have configured my Heroku clone of the site as a second backend server for Fastly. Octopress does some magic here by serving the HTML through Rack, a minimal webserver for ruby.

My site is also monitored by Pingdom and I use Munin for metrics collection.

There are some really amazing takeaways from this. For one, my only expense currently is the roughly $20/mo I pay for the Linode. I would happily pay for any of these services for a real, money-making website but, for this site, I’ll continue to use the free plans.

Second is how much technology is available to us these days. I own zero physical infrastructure and the only thing slightly resembling traditional infrastructure is my Linode. Contrast this to several years ago when I had a third generation HP Proliant DL380 colocated and was starting to experiment with virtualization. I mean, holy shit, you can literally host a website for nothing!

This second point is why I think I love working in the PaaS (platform-as-a-service) space so much. PaaS is still young enough that many skeptics don’t believe it’s a working model. I think we’ve proven that it works, now we just need to prove we can grow with the needs of our customers.