New Gem City Mastering Website

The old website was fine, really...

But, unfortunately, somehow (I'm not entirely sure how, and couldn't be bothered to investigate too deeply), my EC2 server appears to have been compromised.  The website was unreachable, and I could no longer SSH into the box, nor could I connect through the AWS Console.  Rebooting the box had no effect.  As such, I have no earthly idea if it had been maliciously compromised, or had independently gone pear-shaped of its own accord.  I didn't feel like messing with it, so I decided to just stop that EC2 instance and start from scratch.  The quickest way to kick malicious actors out is to simply unplug it.

Instead of standing up another Wordpress site, and given that I'm in Software Engineering and DevOps by day (I spend plenty of time messing with AWS/Servers/Containers already), I decided to look into the various Website Builder services.  After about an hour of research, I decided on Weebly.  I actually quite like it!  It's way easier than messing with EC2 or Fargate and Wordpress, which is a big plus for me personally.  The learning curve was only about an hour, and then I was off and running.  It took a day to build this site, as compared to about a week for the previous site.

Also, the fact that I don't need to worry about updating the OS, Site Framework, SSL Certs and a million Plugins all the time, each update coming with a decent possibility of borking something, well, it's a no-brainer.  One does lose a certain degree of control by choosing a fully-managed website builder service, but I don't particularly need that level of control for this site.

I hope you like the new site!

​-Steve