Whew, it has been a long time since this website was up. Talk about downtime. Long story short, I got a new job as a Cloud Engineer. I moved to a new rental that did not have a router that supported port forwarding. I was not about to replace the shared WiFi and work got busy and yeah you get the idea. The website went down. My server is sleeping in the storage bin. Well that did not take long. Anyway, new year new me.
What do I do when self-hosting is now an issue? Time to turn to the "cloud". Turns out the cloud just means that your data is now hosted by another organization's computers. We are all familiar with the wry jokes about cloud platform by now. Anyway, I looked into what are the available free tier options that we have now. Thanks to past me, this site is just a bunch of static files ready to go, so hosting this site is not hard.
Since I am already going with a cloud provider, I have higher requirements than just "Nginx/Apache in a VM". I looked into solutions that provides high availability worldwide and can remove maintenance headaches from self-hosting; or as the cool kids say, serverless solutions. If I am going to sacrifice my own privacy by not owning my own hosting, I am not letting the sacrifice go in vain. Here are my impressions of the options that I have explored.
There are a couple of smaller or niche cloud providers, but most of them do not have worldwide presence or do not have a good free tier. For those that do, it is not a serverless solution, so this was enough research for me.
Ultimately I went with Cloudflare. It took me less than an hour to set up my Cloudflare account and billing, upload my files into R2, and then configure the one page rule I need to redirect www.clementchiew.me to the index.html file. It was pretty delightful to be able to hand over management of SSL certificates and have QUIC support right out of the gate. I do have my hestitations with Cloudflare, but being able to take advantage of Cloudflare's free R2 egress and free up my cognitive load of web server management is quite valuable to me.
There have been so many changes in the past year, both worldwide and in my personal life. I have so much to write about and so many ideas that I want to note down. See me here again soon.
Home isn't where you're from, it's where you find light when all grows dark.
- Pierce Brown, Golden Son