For many years (2002–12), we hosted with a US company that gave us a Plesk front end. That meant we did a lot in-house: create PHP and MySql databases, started up hosting environments for new domains, even managed our own email server.
That company eventually opened up an Australian branch and my appointed customer manager went from a polite Texan to a rude Australian. I thought that paying hundreds of dollars a month to be insulted wasn’t a good deal, so I resolved to take my business away from this company.
A very good friend heard this and said, ‘I do hosting, how about I take care of it?’
It was a no-brainer. This person had been a friend of over a decade.
He couldn’t handle emails so Zoho wound up with that portion of the deal for around US$30 a month. He would put us on this newfangled thing called Amazon Web Services. The logic seemed sound: you only pay for what you used, he anticipated overall savings for us, and even though we’d lose agency over doing a lot of things ourselves, he’d be there as our own tech. The transfer from old host to AWS took about a week.
This all went well in theory until he was head-hunted by a big firm, though with the promise that he’d still look after us after-hours or on weekends.
Except it was not to be.
I don’t blame my friend one bit: he deserved his new gig and I appreciate that after-hours, he’d be too knackered to work on extra stuff for a friend who was paying him a fraction of what his big job did.
Except our company was now on AWS and it was crap.
I don’t know who designed the user interface with all the three-letter acronyms everywhere, but I have a fairly good idea that they hate people. There was no logic to any of it, and good luck understanding anything if you were a layperson. I figured out a few things (ELB comes to mind, and I knew where to reboot the entire set-up). Our company stagnated digitally during this period, which explains why we set up next to no new sites between 2012 and 2022, because it was all too hard on AWS.
These should be simple things, but like enshittification, which is the province of Big Tech, Amazon made life incredibly hard, probably so it could sell courses on How to Do the Easy Thing the Hard Way and make more money. It looked like a massive swindle like other parts of its operation. Pay for what you used? Pull the other one: our bills kept rising and rising. We were locked in. The instructions were written in gobbledegook. Jeff was laughing all the way to the bank.
We were now in a situation where we had to get ourselves off POS, I mean, AWS.
Except not even computer geeks knew how to use it.
We must have gone through six people who went into the server between 2019 and 2022. Three were never heard from again. Either they are in the next Tron film or they each saw a creepy Japanese girl climb out of a well.
We got help from a fellow Wellingtonian, Carl, and an American gentleman who two colleagues hired (whose permission I don’t have to mention his name), and they managed to progress things considerably more. Carl got Medinge Group on to a new instance and the American tech got Lucire Rouge running.
But that was all they had time for and I wasn’t going to impose.
Eventually, another friend who does IT for his day job—I’m guessing at the same level as the first friend—offered to help.
I owe a debt to this friend and he wishes to remain anonymous, so I can’t even thank him publicly or refer work his way.
It took him two months as he wasn’t familiar with AWS—which he thought was godawful—but persistence and a ton of Linux command-line entries saw us shift to one of the greenest hosts in Europe, Hetzner.
Finally, we had Plesk back.
And finally, we could spin up new sites and databases, and plain run things as we did in the good ol’ days (and some of the not so good ol’ days).
For ten years AWS held our company back and all we could do was limp along.
We’re not computer scientists and, as we saw the tech world enshittify around us, we assumed that if so many people were praising AWS, that the old adage that computers would become easier to use as we raced toward the future was patently untrue.
The process to change hosts took three years instead of one week.
We still have an AWS account as one of our clients hired some IT people who left something on there that we don’t know how to shift.
I could ask the friend who did the big job but ultimately it’s best if the client’s IT contractors did it. I believe that’s where I left it. Except this client hasn’t really made this a priority.
I can handle the small bill each month considering this gets passed on to my client, but I’d rather not give Jeff Bezos a penny. He’s made myriads off us.
Maybe I can figure it out. This client used to host with us but went to Wix, which I think might be the problem.
Still, the day when my friend said I could begin nuking parts of our AWS account was a good day.
Destroying was easy as AWS would warn me what was still up, so I’d go and kill those things before shutting down the entire server.
And other than the tiny thing that we do for the one client, we are blissfully free of one of the most hopeless, ill-conceived and ill-designed computing environments ever.
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