A lot has changed since my last post. I switched from Lightsail to EC2. I finalized switching from Squarespace to AWS for sporterphoto.com. I got a new Mac mini. Oh yeah, and my son was born.
The switch from Lightsail to EC2 was because I wanted to use IAM. The pricing is comparable. There is a bit more complexity to EC2, but a lot more configurability. I was using an "Amazon Linux 2" VM on Lightsail specifically because I was similar to the "Amazon Linux 2 AMI" in EC2, which made the transition easy. I signed up for a Compute Savings Plan shortly after making the switch, saving a few bucks a month.
Switching sporterphoto.com over was simple. I had configured Apache when I brought my EC2 instance up so it was just a matter of DNS changes. I decided to migrate the domain name registration and DNS services to EasyDNS while I was at it, as that is where I register/DNS for all of my domains.
The new Mac mini is still a work in progress. I haven't set it up as a dev environment for my sites yet, as I had with my MacBook Pro. I think I can get Apache/PHP/DynamoDb all running locally, but it just hasn't been a priority. Aside from that, though, I love this new computer. Managing my photo library in Lightroom and Apple Photos is so fast. Web browsing is very smooth. Being able to run iOS apps is quite slick. And the couple games I've tried have run well. I have occasionally battled Bluetooth demons, as is a common issue with these, but it has been working for me recently.
About that other thing-- Conrad James Porter was born back in October. Wow. I can't really summarize the experience except to say wow. Maybe more on that some other time.