How This Website is Hosted

As someone who’s wanted a personal website for nearly 20 years, I’ve gone through many iterations and believe I’ve finally settled on what I think is a sustainable format for my purposes.¹

After much procrastination, I’ve finally decided to document my software-agnostic workflow. This approach allows for easy migration so that if another one (of the services or software I use) bites the dust then it could keep staying alive.

Previous Attempts

Blogspot

My first attempt at a blog was back in $2005$, I was $13$ years old and using it to talk about how my day went just like everyone else. I don’t remember if I deleted it or blogspot simply said that my writing was too cringe to be preserved for the next decade but it was deleted.

Frihost

A little bit later in $2005$, after combing through all the seemingly low-quality free webhosts, I found Frihost. I chose it because it was one of the only ones that let you upload via FTP. And it was free. Well, sort of.

You had to post to their forums at least once a day to pay for the host. For a $13$ year old with no credit card, that was acceptable.

It eventually closed around $2018$, making it the longest ever host I’ve stuck with to date.

I haven’t managed to keep up posting one post per day due to the fact that I’ve been busy going to university, eventually doing an Erasmus, and then eventually looking for a PhD. Sorry Frihost, but also thank you for not deleting my account!

Thankfully I’ve thought of backing up at some point in time, and so I can still upload some parts of my website now. But the SQL tables I’ve had were are now lost forever.

Current Attempt

My past experiences taught me the importance of easy content migration. Informed by these sad melancholic goodbyes to my previous websites, here are the current services I use and how I plan to move when things start to go bad.

Cloudflare as a Domain Registrar

Cloudflare registers the domain at cost. At least that’s what I heard.

Their business is to entice you to pay for other services once you’ve registered with them.

The domain has been prepaid for some years now, so that should last a long time. And if at some point Cloudflare tries to be annoying about it, then it should be easy to migrate to a different registrar.

IONOS as a VPS

I would like to own my data and self-host but that is currently not possible due to the fact that I’m at the point in life where I would still need to move at some point. Plus, self-hosting with your own proper materials need a lot of setup and a lot of upkeep. And I simply don’t have the time right now being that I’ve just started in my career as a software developer.

So, I’ve decided to outsource it a VPS provider. I used Vultr before but I eventually found IONOS which was cheaper. Plus I pay in euros with IONOS so I don’t have a penalty for the currency conversion. I am not locked in to IONOS so if anyone else finds better deals, I’m all ears!

Astro as a Static-Site Generator (SSG)

I used to use Wordpress back when I was using Frihost because I thought that was cool. For all the convenience the WYSIWYG-editor of Wordpress gives, I remember exporting the content back then was a pain. There were too many divs and other html tags that bulked up the export. Plus apparently Wordpress is now in chaos.

Now I use Markdown files to write my content. Then I use astro.build which is a Javascript framework that compiles Markdown files into static HTML files.

If one day, its creators stop supporting it, I have a backup of my Markdown files and it should be easy to port it to the next big thing™. And if I lose that backup of Markdown files, I have HTML files that could theoretically be used to recover that Markdown with a bit of LLM magic.

Conclusion

There you go, second blog post for the day. And hopefully more to come in the future!

Footnotes

1. Hopefully, this sentence ages well. ↩