During last year's summer vacation, with the college entrance examination approaching and my studies becoming increasingly demanding, I decided to put several websites on hold and stop updating them for a year. However, I also had to consider SEO optimization. After all, it had taken a lot of effort to get this little site up to a Baidu weight of 1, and putting it on hold would cause it to lose ranking. So I needed to find a cheap yet stable server that could host this little site for a year. It was around that time that I learned about DigitalOcean. Then I got a $50 promo code on LOC, and that's how I set up a one-year server at the lowest possible cost.

The $50 from the GitHub Student Developer Pack, plus $10 out of my own pocket, was just enough to cover twelve months of expenses.

After twelve months, I discovered that DigitalOcean's server was truly extremely stable. It had never been restarted in more than three hundred days, and even service processes such as MySQL and PHP had remained running the entire time. VPSes from a major provider really are more reliable, unlike some one-man hosting providers that run into problems every few days.

Let's take a look at the traces left by this small site over the past year. I used GoAccess to analyze the website logs; see post cid="12" /

The log size was 333.25 MB (about 1 MB per day), with 1,226,543 total requests, 1,226,368 valid requests, and 175 erroneous requests (an error rate close to one in ten thousand), 19,696 IP addresses, 250,668 UVs, and total bandwidth usage of 12.61 GiB.

After writing low-quality posts for so long, I finally reached Baidu weight 1 (measured by Chinaz on 2019.07.10; Aizhan did not assign a rating).

Now let's take a look at the backup files generated over the past year.

There are more than 30 GB of files. In fact, this small site's backup files don't take up much space; most of it is occupied by several other sites.

A backup every three days—truly incredibly stable!!!

While praising DigitalOcean here, we must not forget the contribution of Baota either. After all, it is the combination of the two that makes the best data backups possible.

Finally, with the rise of Douyin and the arrival of the short-video era, Vlogs have recently become popular—recording life through video. Gradually, fewer and fewer people are willing to write blogs, and I am no exception.

After the college entrance examination, I became increasingly lazy. Sometimes I would want to write something, only to suddenly lose the desire to do so. I realized that I should change the situation and cure my procrastination.

From now on, whenever I have an idea, I will record it and post it on my blog as soon as possible. Of course, if I make some interesting videos, I can also post them as Vlogs.

So, stay tuned!