Another attempt at reviving my blog after only 7 posts for the entire year. But I finally figured out what this blog can be used for.
So the history of my blog started with me just ranting about my thoughts and feelings, that was many many years ago when I first started blogging, there was barely any filter to the things that I wrote and it was a rant every single damn day. That changed when I became more concerned with privacy.
It started with writing my inner thoughts and feelings on a self-hosted WordPress instance inside of a VM, then that transitioned to pen and paper and I almost completely stopped blogging altogether. Last year, I made the choice start journaling on a very regular basis, using a journaling app called Journey. It was great! I wrote on a near daily basis and I felt like I have a better grasp of my life.
Then I started writing Medium articles to have a better reach to tech audiences, which was the original intent of this revamped blog in 2018. But this blog quickly died down cause it’s not easy to pump out articles like that quickly.
So what is the point of this blog then? This will be where I just spam/rant/note down the interesting things that I’ve done over the week, just purely tech related, because a lot of these thoughts and experiences have been omitted in my journal (it’s boring to write about those in a journal). I’ve set a goal of writing one per week, to consolidate the fun things that I’ve been up to.
This week, I finally let go of the reins on my blog. Over the years I have tried various methods of hosting my blog, but never a typical hosting provider (e.g. BlueHost). Reason being that I loved tinkering with the settings and the server and it gives me more satisfaction that I control the entire stack from the hardware all the way till the network and what you see on your browser. Trust me, it has really changed a lot.
How much has my hosting changed? It started with Blogger, then WordPress, then self-hosted WordPress, then self-hosted ghost, then back to self-hosted WordPress and today, I am hosting WordPress with a hosting provider called Hostinger.
Why Hostinger? Well basically cause it’s the cheapest one out there that I could find. Even though many websites claim that it costs $0.80/month, the only offer I found was $0.99/month, plus some discount code from Honey, it became $0.92/month with a 48 month commitment. Which came up to $44.16 for 48 months (4 years).
That is insanely cheap, because I was hosting it on DigitalOcean, and had to upgrade to the $10/month node because the cheapest option ($5) can’t support WordPress plus the other services that I am running. Plus a weekly backup that costs $2/month. The moment I remove WordPress from my node, I no longer need backups because the services are all stateless. Just like that, I saved $6/month, $72/year. It’s not a huge amount, but as an engineer/architect it makes me feel extremely pleased with the efficient costing (42.8% cheaper).
The setup was mostly painless, Hostinger has a beautified cPanel interface, which it’s still something that I’m not familiar with and I had trouble setting up the strict SSL connection with Cloudflare. But hey! After a quick email exchange with the customer support I managed to get it all up and working.
All in all it took me about a day worth of effort here and there to migrate everything and get it all up and running. Looking at my node’s resources after the purge makes me feel confident that I can get away with the lowest tier, and still have some left over resources to run some simple scripts (and the telegram bot).
I think it’s insane that nowadays we can host static websites with a web server that consumes less than 2 mb of memory, how crazy is that?
Swinging back to this hosting provider, it stills feel pretty sluggish most of the times, on WordPress and especially on cPanel. But it’s honestly good enough for writing like this, especially when there’s caching and a CDN to take care of most of the traffic. Let’s see how this performs over the course of a month then I’ll come back for a review!