title: Hosting on Vultr VPS date: February 16, 2021 18:10 ---
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:
As mentioned, the website is served with Nginx. It's still statically generated
with my Ruby script. I build locally and use rsync
to incrementally
update the hosted files.
I use certbot with the Nginx plugin to get an SSL certificate. A cron job should ensure the certificate is updated automatically before expiry.
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 news.ycombinator.com
.
So far my log analysis has been very ad hoc — just manually parsing the log files with command line tools and Vim. For example, to get that 200 number from above I ran
awk '/ycombinator/ { print $1 }' logs | sort | uniq | wc -lI wonder if there are any good tools for parsing and analyzing Nginx logs, or if I should build something simple of my own.
In addition to this website, I'm also using the VPS to host a personal email server and some git repos. The email server is based on Postfix and Dovecot and was painlessly installed and configured thanks to emailwiz. The git frontend is cgit. I might write a post about setting up and configuring it later. Overall quite happy with what it looks like and what it offers.