I am trying to write one post a day for 100 days, this is day number 11, and I run out of ideas, fortunately I post about it in the FOSSTodon Network, and ALazarte came this this sugestion, so I will write about that.
Let’s start by letting you know what I use.
- Domain name provider
- DNS provider
- Hosting provider (VPS)
- CDN provider
Now let’s go into each one of those points.
Domain name provider
I bought my first domain in 2007, it was Go2Linux.org and I bought at Misk.com, I had at least one domain there until last month. Why I moved away?. Well, back in 2010 I wanted a more personal domain, so I looked at one with my last name, I got Garron.me, but Misk did not offer .me TLDs at that time, so I got my domain at DNSimple, since then I slowly moved all my domains from Misk to DNSimple.
I have never had an issue with Misk, but I finally leave them. With DNSimple I have a place to buy my domains and they also provide a good DNS service. Their prices are not the best, I was thinking a week ago, about moving once again to NameCheap, but I preferred not to, just because I wanted to avoid the hassle.
DNS provider
I started running my own DNS server in a CentOS Linux in my office, I worked that way until I moved to Linode, and used their DNS servers to host my zones.
I moved to Route53 from AWS for some years, because they had this feature, they can give different IP addresses based on where your visitors are, I needed that because I was deploying my own CDN. It really worked for some years with my site, I was nice and fun to optimize my blog this way, I had one server in US (New York), one in Europe (Germany), One in the Pacific (Tokyo) and one in India (Mumbai), some were from Linode some from Digital Ocean.
Right now I am using DNSimple and CloudFlare to give me DNS services, I think the work well, I had just one issue, when moving from AWS to DNSimple, but with an email to support, I got it fixed in one hour.
Hosting Provider
At this point the story will be a little longer. It al started in 2007, I was hosting Go2Linux at my own Linux server in my Office, yes I was hosting my site from Bolivia. Then This story became popular in SlashDot, and my server died, so I moved to a shared hosted server in Canada, and it happened again, this posts got digged and my site was dead again, then I moved to Linode, and have been with them until now.
Of course I tried a lot of other options in these years. From 2009 to 2011 I was at Linode, then when I moved my site from Drupal to Jekyll I started moving it around, it is easy to do it with an static site, maybe too easy, my site has been hosted at:
And maybe others, but I always went back to VPSs, Linode and Digital Ocean, both are great, it is hard to choose, I like both the same. I am now with Linode, but may move to DO anytime and then come back, sometimes I am with both of them.
To me the best way to host your site is on a VPS, I like to tweak Apache, Nginx or Varnish (yes I have used all of them at some thime) and gzip the files on the fly with the WebServer, set the headers and have access to redirects (I prefer .htacces because I had edit in my PC and upload with the rest of my static site).
As for bare metal server, as I said, I have started on a physical server in my own office here in Bolivia, so I know that it requieres more time and dedication, and I think I really do not need all that power, and also do not want to pay that bill to have it in a DataCenter, and to have it at home, without a good infraestructure I think is a bad idea.
CDN
I always wanted to use CDNs I have started with AWS Cloudfront, but the hit ratio was always low, I think they have to many POPs and my site is not that big to stay in the edge servers, I have also used CloudFiles from Rackspace with same results.
I liked the results of Fastly and MaxCDN, but the were too expensive, so, I decided once again to have full control over my services, and host my own CDN, I really, really enjoy having full control of my services and host them myself.
Some other services I have hosted are:
So, back on CDN, thanks to Kev and this post I am using BunnyCDN now for most of my sites, and Cloudflare for only one of them.
Final Words
I think I host my services not because I can do it better, just because I can, and because that is funny, I am not a sysadmin, this is just a hobby, but I would loved to work as a sysadmin.