RamNode
Some time ago I moved my virtual private server to a new provider. The old one was fine, but I wanted to play around with IPv6 and RamNode offered that. They were also able to host CentOS 7 which I was keen to familiarize myself with.
More recently they added a hosting site in my city, so I took them up on their offer to migrate my VPS. I was very impressed, it was about a 15 minute process and went flawlessly.
This site still sits behind CloudFlare, which has been doing a splendid job although there has not really been enough traffic to give it a decent test.
CloudFlare and a Virtual Private Server
It wasn't that long ago that people paid fairly hefty monthly rates to host web sites, with pitifully small storage quotas.
Then along came companies like DreamHost that promised massive amounts of storage at much lower cost. But even small personal sites would still be up for hundreds of dollars per year in hosting fees.
By this time, we all had 24/7 broadband internet. And (depending on your ISP's policy) it was quite feasible to serve your own site from your home, for free, and with as much storage as you would like. For personal sites this worked fine, but there was always the risk of the Slashdot effect, which would render your home internet connection unusable and probably get you kicked off your ISP.
BlazeBlogger
After a short and non-extensive search, I selected BlazeBlogger as the CMS tool for this site.
It does feel a bit simple compared to the more common systems, but it has a edit-source-generate-output workflow that feels very familiar to software developers, and lets me stay close to the CSS and HTML code that defines the look of the site.
There are no databases, the source files can be kept under version
control, and the output is static HTML pages (and therefore
nice and fast). A few simple command-line tools are used to add/edit pages,
and then the site is generated with blaze-make. After that its
a simple matter of previewing and using rsync
to upload it to the web server.
I'm not sure if the lack of a comment system is a good thing or a bad thing. So many sites out there only have nonsense or spam in their comments. But the lack of a feedback channel is a bit of a shame. Perhaps I'll try an email address for feedback submission, and see if that generates ridiculous amounts of spam or not.
If you have a Mac, you can easily install it (and all sorts of other packages) using the Homebrew package manager.