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+title: Hosting on Vultr VPS
+date: February 16, 2021 18:10
+---
+<p>
+This website was originally hosted for free with GitLab Pages. As of a few weeks
+ago, it's now being served by Nginx from a Vultr VPS. Here's a few reasons why I
+made the switch:
+
+<ul>
+    <li>
+        I get a bit of insight into website traffic from Nginx logs, without
+        needing to resort to something like Google analytics.
+    </li>
+    <li>
+        I gain some internet independence. Sure, now I'm relying on Vultr
+        instead of GitLab, but I can always switch to a different VPS provider
+        (or, with enough grit, use own hardware) which will have the same
+        environment, while GitLab Pages is a setup specific to GitLab.
+    <li>
+        I've wanted to play around with self-hosting various services for a
+        while now.
+    </li>
+</ul>
+</p>
+
+<h3>Current setup</h3>
+
+<p>
+As mentioned, the website is served with Nginx. It's still statically generated
+with my Ruby script. I build locally and use <code>rsync</code> to incrementally
+update the hosted files.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I use <a href='https://certbot.eff.org/'>certbot</a> with the Nginx plugin to
+get an SSL certificate. A cron job should ensure the certificate is updated
+automatically before expiry.
+</p>
+
+<h3>Website traffic analysis</h3>
+<p>
+I've already gotten some interesting statistics from server logs. The day I
+posted a Hacker News comment linking to one of my blog posts, there were four
+times as many HTTP requests received, including around 200 unique IPs referred
+from <code>news.ycombinator.com</code>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So far my log analysis has been very ad hoc &mdash; just manually parsing the
+log files with command line tools and Vim. For example, to get that 200 number
+from above I ran
+
+<pre>
+awk '/ycombinator/ { print $1 }' logs | sort | uniq | wc -l
+</pre>
+
+I wonder if there are any good tools for parsing and analyzing Nginx logs, or if
+I should build something simple of my own.
+</p>
+
+<h3>Self-hosting</h3>
+<p>
+In addition to this website, I'm also using the VPS to host a personal email
+server and some <a href='https://git.m-chrzan.xyz'>git repos</a>. The email
+server is based on Postfix and Dovecot and was painlessly installed and
+configured thanks to
+<a href='https://github.com/LukeSmithxyz/emailwiz'>emailwiz</a>. The git
+frontend is <a href='https://git.zx2c4.com/cgit/'>cgit</a>. I might write a post
+about setting up and configuring it later. Overall quite happy with what it
+looks like and what it offers.
+</p>