This website is hosted on a VPS from Vultr, it is cheap - $6 a month, has 1GB of RAM, 1 vCPU, a 25GB disk and 2000GB bandwidth. Adequate for serving a statically generated site. In this post I will detail how I set the VPS up, and share how I created a deployment pipeline which uses two gitlab runners, one on my home network and one on the VPS to deploy the website. The site is served using NGINX, which is a common server, used a lot for load balancing and used for Ingress in Kubernetes. Cloudflare also provides my DNS and protection from DDoS, etc, and it’s free. I use Let’s Encrypt for a free SSL certificate and the certificate is automatically renewed every 60 days by certbot (Let’s Encrypt certs expire after 90 days, do the renew process is done 30 days prior to account for delays). Cloudflare does have it’s own certificates in front of it though, which are provided by Google.

I moved this blog to Hugo a while ago, which is a static site generator built on golang. Recently, I had to update the server hosting my site, but it was too far behind on updates to run an upgrade to the latest version, so I backed up my site and powered it off and created a new server. Unfortunately, my backup only had the nginx config which pointed to a container running my blog. I did have a backup of the repository which had the site content and theme, but I struggled getting it to build, but resolved it. I modified the appearance “I was using bootstrap”, and got it running locally. But I decided to switch to Tailwind CSS as it seems to be the new cool thing in web development. This also simplified my build process, as I no longer had to install bootstrapcss and gulp in my theme and run the gulpfile during development and during a deploy, it was all handled now by hugo.