Adventures in Getting a Site Hosted

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A couple years, I decided that was the year I was going to finally get a website setup. Fast forward to a couple days ago and that's how long it took me to begin executing on that plan. I tend to be afflicted with Paralysis By Analysis when it comes to something that I don't know how to start. Rather than just try, I think of all the ways it could fail. I know this about me and I also know that it's debilitating. Sometimes the debilitation wins. Sometimes I roll up my sleeves and get my hands dirty and break shit. The latter is almost always more rewarding than the former, yet the internal struggle remains. 

But enough with the meta-crap, this post is meant to explain my approach to getting my domain name hosted with something. I've had this Blogger account for several years. It's free. It's easy. It's a little too easy to ignore, so I'm thinking I may resurrect it a little bit and start writing about my goings on as a mechanism for growth and learnin' shit. When I bought the domain names a while back, I decided I would make a subdomain for the blog, so I redirected that domain to this site. The other, jasonfedler.com, I left dormant for the last couple years. 

My buddy had a server, so I started down the path of getting it hosted on his metal, but that quickly became frustrating, so I stopped for a while. I didn't know what all the hosting jargon meant and, anyway, I had more important stuff to do, apparently. I still kinda don't, but I mucked about and applied some Google Fu to figure some things out and now jasonfedler.com is alive, hosted on a Linode server running Ubuntu 20.04, using nginx as a simple web server and using LetsEncrypt to get the SSL part working. A crash course, indeed. Linode has a bunch of tutorial guides to get things running and that made things easy enough for a dummy like me to get it working.

Anyway, I've learned a lot of superficial knowledge during this process and I wanted to write about it in an effort to maybe set that knowledge a little deeper. We'll see how that works. I'm probably going to make some mistakes, but I'm OK with that. 

I would like to call out Allen, Joe and Michael (because that's alphabetical, and alphabetical is fair) from CodingBlocks.net with their bi-weekly inspiration and insight to software development. I appreciate y'all more than I can express. Thanks for being awesome.

Here are some of the things I used / learned during this process (some of these things I would fail a simple quiz if given a chance while others are a little more deeply learned):

  • Linode - Linux servers
  • nginx (don't forget the final semicolon for each line!)
  • Bash / command line commands
  • apt
  • apt-get
  • curl
  • ssh

More to come. I hope!

Update 09-Feb-2020

I updated the nginx configuration to redirect http traffic to https. The server is now configured to self-update, so no need to concern myself with making sure things stay up to date, but I will check every so often, because...well, software. The site is currently just a simple HTML page and not hosting a .NET Core service running yet, but that's the next step.


Comments

  1. mydotTuesday, November 16, 2021 at 10:39:00 AM EST

    You have worked nicely with your insights that makes our work easy. The information you have provided is really factual and significant for us. Keep sharing these types of article, Thank you.Domain Registration Company Nigeria

    ReplyDelete
  2. HalleboseMonday, May 23, 2022 at 2:18:00 PM EDT

    Interesting experience

    ReplyDelete

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