This website was originally hosted for free with GitLab Pages. As of a few weeks ago, it's now being served by Nginx from a Vultr VPS. Here's a few reasons why I made the switch:
As mentioned, the website is served with Nginx. It's still statically generated
with my Ruby script. I build locally and use rsync to incrementally
update the hosted files.
I use certbot with the Nginx plugin to get an SSL certificate. A cron job should ensure the certificate is updated automatically before expiry.
I've already gotten some interesting statistics from server logs. The day I
posted a Hacker News comment linking to one of my blog posts, there were four
times as many HTTP requests received, including around 200 unique IPs referred
from news.ycombinator.com.
So far my log analysis has been very ad hoc — just manually parsing the log files with command line tools and Vim. For example, to get that 200 number from above I ran
awk '/ycombinator/ { print $1 }' logs | sort | uniq | wc -l
I wonder if there are any good tools for parsing and analyzing Nginx logs, or if
I should build something simple of my own.
In addition to this website, I'm also using the VPS to host a personal email server and some git repos. The email server is based on Postfix and Dovecot and was painlessly installed and configured thanks to emailwiz. The git frontend is cgit. I might write a post about setting up and configuring it later. Overall quite happy with what it looks like and what it offers.