Hello Amazon Lightsail, Good by 1&1 dedicated server

Many of you may have heard about Amazon’s latest product named Lightsail.  This service is designed to competed with shared hosting providers.  A few years back I moved my websites from shared hosting, to self hosing, and ultimately to a dedicated server with 1&1 hostsing.  For $85 a month it wasn’t a bad deal.  Although the server seemed very sluggish at times and the network wasn’t very fast it was still better than shared hosting.

Over the course of the last two weeks I moved all my web assets to Amazon Lightsail and I couldn’t be happier.  The Amazon network is lightening fast and the $5 per month instance is out performing the dedicated server I had from 1&1 hosting.  Lightsail offers many plans starting at $5 a month all the way to $80 a month.

Continue reading “Hello Amazon Lightsail, Good by 1&1 dedicated server”

Ubiquiti Unifi Controller

As I start to dig into each of the individual Ubiquiti components that I wrote about in my previous article,  I though it would be a good idea to start with the Unifi Controller.  The Unifi controller is the central management interface for all the components I am using.  Ubiquiti makes a version for just about every operating system so you shouldn’t have any issues finding your flavor of choice.    I use to run the MAC version when I was only using the Unifi AC access points.  I would load it if I wanted to make a change or update firmware.  It wasn’t until recently that I upgraded to the 5.x version of the Unifi Controller and saw the significant changes they had made to the platform.  This is really what prompted me to overhaul my network and standardize on the Unifi line of networking products.

I have no moved to a dedicated Unifi Controller running in a VM on Ubuntu 16.04.  As we all expect of applications these days the installation was very simple using apt-get to perform the install.  Once I had my dedicated Unifi server installed I exported the data from my install my mac and imported it into the new server and bam, all was up to date and it was ready to go.  I moved to the dedicated server while I still only had my (3) Wireless AC Access points.  AT that point I had no Deep Packet Inspection or other features provided by the Security Gateway.

Continue reading “Ubiquiti Unifi Controller”

Ubiquiti has topped the cake with their Unifi Product Line

I have been a fan of Ubiquiti for years, however recently I have become an even bigger fan boy for their networking and video security products.  Although Ubiquiti is a manufacturer of “Enterprise” grade products I believe they are perfect for todays home as well.  Their products are priced cheap making them a perfect fit.  In this article I’m going to focus on (4) of their Unifi products I am using in my home network that are absolutely awesome!

main_page

 

Continue reading “Ubiquiti has topped the cake with their Unifi Product Line”