After (checks billing history) nine years ("Joined on: 2015-02-03") I am finally giving up on Dreamhost hosting. I’m going to keep my domains there because I have a bunch of free credits from things and they make it easy enough to do them "DNS Only" and manage the CNAME and ALIAS records and so on, but as soon as this DNS move over finishes (which will be before this post has gone up, I expect), I will have cancelled my shared hosting. Previously I was on the "Unlimited" tier, and now I’m on the "Shared Stater" plan, but soon I will be on no plan, and it will be beautiful. As this is a static site, there are so many free places to host it, that I really shouldn’t be paying to do so. It made more sense when I was also hosting a "professional" personal site, my wife’s bakery site, school projects, etc., but now? Not really.

The other motivator to move things over is that Dreamhost recently (quietly) removed Passenger, which is what I previously had used to facilitate hosting the Flask-baked bakery site, and as I consider adding some "additional functionality" to this site via our dear friend HTMX, it’s too much trouble to manage the environment, deployment, etc., myself. So I’m giving Render a try. Maybe I’ll hate it. Maybe it’ll end up costing me money.[1] Maybe they’re secretly super unethical (I did google this first). Still: deployment is easy and I can (finally) ditch CircleCi, which also will be good.[2]

It’s a little annoying to configure all the DNS stuff but once that’s done it’ll be done, you know?

And though I do intend to make a newsletter thing and use this as a launching pad for the spiritual successor to Response,[3] in the meantime, while I build out all the other infrastructure, I won’t be paying for hosting I don’t really have to pay for, and this is a very wonderful thing.[4]

1. It will if/when I decide I need a database, but then: that’s still cheaper than Dreamhost.
2. Because I lost my login information and can’t seem to get them to reset my password? Maybe this was a temporary hiccup on their end, but still: fewer services/apps to manage is a good thing.
3. Details TK
4. This also coincides with other planned changes, e.g., potentially moving to Hugo from Jekyll, since though I really do love Jekyll, I have been running this blog long enough that it’s taking a while to build the site and also I am writing much more Go than Ruby these days, and it would be nice to feel aligned.