July 27, 2024
Disclaimer: Some of you are going to find this boring but I thought that some of the geeks out there might like to know.TLDR: Microsoft tried to rob me and I had to rewrite the site in my spare time. It's not quite perfect and you'll see lots of updates coming soon.
You might be asking, "what happened to the old website?" Good question. In reality, apart from it being a little old there wasn't anything wrong with it and it served us proud for about 7-8 years. In reality, 7-8 years in web development is centuries.
The site was hosted on Microsoft's Azure platform for the most part because I used to be a Microsoft Partner and we hosted it for free. Some of you will know I used to work in IT prior to working in the care sector. Well, this year that old license expired as I didn't renew it as I no longer needed it. This is where our troubles started.
In about Feb-Mar time Microsoft send me a bill for £168 for Azure. I challenged it as the bill was unexpected and that's when I found out my license had expired. Credit to Microsoft support, they gave me the money back as it was an oversight on both parties. We had a problem now though as Microsoft's hosting can be quite expensive. This meant we needed a new home.
We don't take a profit from organising the Sutton Poker games. Gary and anyone that supports him does so with their own free time for the love of the game so because we're not taking a profit, there is no money to pay for web hosting. Most app hosting sites are going to charge £5 per month min and for some of the features we need probably more like £10 per month. Not a million quid, but it all adds up!
Linux providers seemed to be the answer as they tend to be more cost effective. However, this was a problem for the old website as it couldn't be ran on a linux server. For me to continue to cover the cost, we needed to move to linux which meant I needed to rewrite the Sutton Poker website. The old app was written using ASP pages, the new site has been written in ASPNET Core Blazor running on dotnet 8.
This gives us loads of advantages. 1) It's their latest stack, it'll be supported for some time. 2) The tools for Blazor are amazing and I already have loads of new ideas. 3) It can be hosted on linux.
Digital Ocean is now where the new website resides. They're super reputable, reliable and I can see the website is nice and responsive. Hopefully we've found a nice new home.
I have loads of new features in mind for the new site. New game information, new player profiles, blog posts, and more. Please let me know if you have any feedback on the Sutton Poker Facebook page.
For those of you that made it this far, thanks for reading, I hope you found it somewhat interesting and I'll see you at the tables soon.
Paul.
