Many Into One Reid JS November 1, 2023

I'm in the process of combining a bunch of websites and apps as subdomains of hazybridge.com. For example, this blog (blog.hazybridge.com) replaces reidjs.substack.com. The podcast website is now bawcast.com These are my goals & intentions for the new strategy:

long term portability: prefer plaintext and no-code or low-code solutions.
low cost: prefer free software.
avoid vendor lock-in: where forced to use a vendor, e.g. for server hosting, avoid big, monopolistic companies. I want to be able to 'pack up and move elsewhere' if any vendor turns evil.
low complexity: try to require as few steps as possible to add new sites, avoid scope creep & unnecessary technologies.
speed: updates to the website should be fast and I want to keep the response size small.

My old webhosting approach

Every time I want to host a new website I had to:

Buy the domain from namecheap.com
Create a new git repository on github.com
Turn on GitHub Pages and configure DNS from namecheap to point towards GitHub

This approach works great, until you want subdomains or to run processes on the server. I ran into the limits of GitHub page, you don't have any control over the server that hosts your website. There's also significant latency when you push to github, because a GitHub action has to run to rebuild the page.

My new webhosting approach

These tasks are performed once:

Use a preexisting domain from namecheap, hazybridge.com
Provision a DigitalOcean Droplet and point namecheap DNS towards DigitalOcean
Install NGINX

Then, to add a new project as a subdomain

Create a new NGINX server block
Create a new 'A' Record for the subdomain on DigitalOcean
rsync the html/css/js files to the Droplet

The price is roughly the same, but I am taking on the responsibility of managing the server and all the potential risk that comes with that. The upside is that I have full control of the server and I lower my dependence on NameCheap and GitHub. Also, updates to the subdomains are nearly instantaneous. I'm going to keep moving sites over and see if anything unexpected happens, but overall I'm optimistic about this new approach.