I mentioned in my last post that I was thinking of going back to a self hosted web server. Well, I did.

Why

Honestly, because I wanted to. I kinda miss the feeling of building my site locally and pushing it. Feels old school, feels more, mine.

Old And New

The way I was hosting this site, was by having GitHub do everything. The build and hosting. All I had to do was push the HUGO project. This worked pretty well, and allowed me to do things like publish from my phone. However, GitHub had some limitations. Mainly that the total size of my deployed site had to be under 1GB. At the moment, that’s not an issue, as my site is around 110MB all in.

That 110MB came with a fair bit of effort. I wrote script to convert any image I was going use into webp. This saved on repo space, and kept the deployment size down. However, not everything supports webp.

Recently, I’ve been reading more blog posts using pocket on my Kobo ereader. This has been a pretty fantastic experience. Except, the Kobo doesn’t support webp images. And I like to read my own posts on it, on occasion.

Now, I could have just started using jpg and png, not caring about space. I still would have been fine for quite awhile. But where’s the fun in that.

As of right now, this site is being hosted on a VPS running NGINX. Nothing fancy going on here. But, I’m not restricted by a 1GB site limit anymore. Deploy times are also down by a lot.

On GitHub, it would need to grab a runner, clone my repo down, install HUGO, build the site, upload the build, then deploy the site. WIth som work, I got this down to around 23 seconds for a basic rebuild. Now, with a simple script on my Mac, my site gots built, rscnyced to the VPS, and that is. Around 4 seconds. This is more a bit of fun than anything.

Thoughts

At the moment, I’m liking this. It makes my site feel more mine. I know that may not make sense, but I like it. Will I stick with it, most likely.