I started out this week moving this blog from Godaddy, basically because after your first ‘cheap’ year, the cost was going to ramp up to £60 for the luxury of the domain name, more than £100 up front for hosting charges and £50 for an email address. I wasnt happy! I already have email, I would have liked to have kept the domain name but the hosting prices and it all rolled into one was just more than I was willing to pay for a website that I rarely update or even look at. This is just a hobby tinkering website at the end of the day.

So I thought, well, I have my Unraid server, it cant be that difficult to host WordPress myself, right? And it wasnt, not really. There were a few things I had to learn – I already had LetsEncrypt setup, as well as DuckDNS for my Nextcloud server, so it wasnt too much of a stress to get WordPress set up.

However, this is where the paranoia set in – I really want as little (ideally nothing) on my personal home storage server to be public facing and accessible. To me, that just seems like asking for trouble.

I’d heard of Linode through various Youtubers but never really took the time to log in and make an account – I thought Id just give it a try and see what it was like, there’s currently a 60 day $100 credit promotion at the moment and even though I thought I’d never be able to get it working, well, here we are! 🙂

I have basically removed everything from Godaddy, my domain is now with Google domains which is £10 a year (saving £50 straight away!), this hosting is $5 a month, but free for two months through the promotion, and I’m moving Nextcloud to Linode also to host all my images and files and give me ‘cloud access’ via the mobile app on my iPhone – so nothing is now public facing on my server. Should I feel differently in 2 months time when the linode promotion ends, I can spin my server back up and have everything I need in an instant, and that’s reassurance that money cant (well, obviously it can) buy.

The site is certainly more responsive. I’ve opted for the basic Nanode 1GB, 1 core setup for $5 a month, but scaling should be easy and it’s basically very inexpensive as the subscription is rolling with no upfront costs. Class 🙂

Thought of the day: Stress can be overcome with money, or alcohol, or love. If you can’t get over the stress, try applying one of these three things and just watch it melt away. Maybe.