Shortly after the buzz of MS purchasing GitHub I started self-hosting a {{ external “https://gitea.io/" “Gitea” />}} stack using a Docker Compose file I threw together just for the occasion. The hosting I chose at the time was a $5 Vultr VPS with the following specs:

• CPU: 1 vCore
• RAM: 1024 MB
• Storage: 25 GB SSD
• Bandwidth: 1000 GB

I chose Vultr partly because they’ve been shown to be faster than DigitalOcean and Lightsail. But really I just needed a testbed to prove things out to finally feel confident enough to abandon GitHub.

But Vultr isn’t cutting it anymore. Their $5/month VPS option, while arguably a great deal, isn’t delivering enough storage. Sure I could add block storage at $0.50 per GB or even consider switching to Linode. But I don’t see the point of either when Amazon offers a 40 GB SSD option at $5 an instance with double the bandwidth offered by Vultr and half the cost of the Linode equivalent plan.

As luck would have it, last night I ran out of disk space on Vultr. What better a time to make the switch over to Amazon Lightsail? And if you’re looking to self-host Gitea on Lightsail, here’s how you can too.

Three years ago I started a website called cabinhack.com to scratch an itch after discovering Hugo and starting development on After Dark. At the time my primary website was running Jekyll and build times were nearing the 2-3 minute mark for little more than 70-80 blog posts.