Let me tell you a story about this exact website.
I’m not too sure, but I believe it all started when my friend got a website. So many cool things you can do with a website! I also wanted one for myself.
So, I made a super basic “Hello World” HTTP server using Heroku’s free plan but quickly forgot about it.
Then, the unfortunate day came, the day when Salesforce killed Heroku’s free plan, which made me remember my website.
Well, someone as professional as me couldn’t rely on ephemeral free domains.
We all know how bad example.noip.com domains look…
At first, I was going to get a .is-a.dev domain, since those are free, but, in the end, ended up getting a .dev domain for only R$50 (~10$) a year on Google Domains.
Taking ayunami’s suggestion, I got an AMAZING free VPS at OCI for absolutely free, but ended up deleting it since it had been created with 16GB of RAM instead of 24.
Rookie mistake, I couldn’t re-create it, since Oracle ran out of free servers, and had to accept 2 single-core 1GB RAM servers that I’m locked out of nowadays.
Following chip’s steps, I used an old laptop as a server, which is how I’m hosting this website to this day.
I didn’t do it any sooner because I didn’t have any computers available (to be transformed into a 24/7 server). That was, until my grandpa knew about it, since he reached out to the company he owns and they gave us one low-end laptop and 2 mid/high-end ones.
I first installed Debian on low-end one, but didn’t like it, since it didn’t have fastfetch or an easy to install it, so I switched to Ubuntu Server, which I kind of regret nowadays, I may switch to NixOS any time soon.
And as for the mid/high-end ones, one I’m using as a personal alternative to my main high-end workstation and the other one I gave away to a cousin in need.
But enough about hardware, what about the website itself?
Well, I first used 11ty, which is very minimal, simple and intuitive but also limited.
For deployment, I first tried Render, which I didn’t like because the free options were too limiting, then Vercel, which was a bummer for the same reason, then Netlify, which had all the features I needed.
From some redditing, it seems like Cloudflare and Github Pages are also solid options.
But since I got my laptop server working, I have wanted to try out self-hosting, so I can have a 24/7 API that allows me to dynamically fetch interesting data.
And that’s one of the reasons why I migrated to astro very recently (what’s currently in use), and it has been much better then 11ty for me!