Moving, moving, moving
I started this blog in 2022 to play with cloud infrastructure while recording short book reviews. I started on Google Cloud with Wordpress. I migrated from Wordpress to Jekyll so that I could write my entries with Neovim in Markdown. Migrating from Wordpress also meant that I could build and test my blog locally, and reduce my reliance on a database and PHP.
I saw folks at work recommend Linode for cheap VMs, so gave that a go. I spent less than $8 a month hosting my site on the smallest VM that Linode offers. Their getting started documentation is pretty good, but once you start branching out from that I noticed some edges were frayed. Not bad. Google Cloud tends to focus on enterprise developers, and Linode (at the time I started using it) tended to focus on smaller non-enterprise developers. I’m not sure that’ll remain the case, as Akamai purchased Linode and is slowly retiring the Linode name. I won’t be surprised if targeting Enterprise customers is next.
Google and Squarespace announced last week that Google is selling Google Domains to Squarespace. I already have ill-feelings with Reddit’s handling of things as of late, and I don’t want to wait around and find out what happens with Squarespace. So I moved domain registrars this weekend to namecheap, closed my Google Workspace account (for reasons), and moved to Zoho Mail. And because I’m up for a challenge, I took the advice for cheap hosts by moving my blog to NearlyFreeSpeech.net.
I’m less than thrilled with Zoho’s belief that they need to spam my inbox with their advertisement crap. Namecheap seems alright. NearlyFreeSpeech.net is dead honest about their spartan support; on the other hand, I don’t mind that I’m not paying for a full VM that I’m mostly not using.
Time will tell how I feel for all of these for sure.