At the ripe age of 28 and after 13 years of programming experience, I'm finally making a personal website. I'm also taking this opportunity to document the process of creating a personal website. Basically just writing up my thoughts around every choice I make for the website and snapshots of different stages of the website. I'm just going to be writing rambly paragraphs for now because I haven't decided on how I want to format these posts.
Okay so I guess the first choice I had to make is what provider I want to use to host my cloud server. My initial thought was to use DigitalOcean since I've messed around with their VMs before, but then I thought more about the current political/environmental landscape around cloud computing. Big thing right now is that data centers have an insane ecological impact and they're just getting started. No one really cares enough to do much about it either. I know my choice isn't going to be perfect or affect anything either (no ethical consumption under capitalism and such), but I'd like to just be more intentional about it instead of just choosing the cheapest option.
Criteria:
Options I considered:
Ultimately, I went with FullHost. It was the cheapest monthly option and has everything I need. Web Hosting Canada seems like a nice alternative though too if I ever need anything more beefy.
I'm thinking just doing my full initials is fine since ttlp.com has a good ring to it. Well the Tle’ Nax T’awei Group thought so too and already own that domain name for their business holding partnership. ttlp.ca is free but I kind of just want to avoid that confusion. Next best thing is using my Vietnamese initials LPTT since Vietnamese names are actually supposed to go last name, then middle, then first. Unfortunately, lptt.com is already taken by some domain squatter, but lptt.ca is open for business!
Honestly, I didn't think there was much of a choice to make here. nginx is pretty much the default web server. I looked up "nginx alternatives" and figured there wasn't going be much, but then I read up on caddy. Caddy is basically just a modern alternative to nginx with a simpler configuration language. It also automatically creates and renews TLS certificates for your sites and auto-configures HTTPS too (even localhost). nginx has always been great to me and not too hard to scaffold, but I gotta say, all of caddy's automation sounds real nice. I'm excited to try it out and compare the experience. I really am a systems infra girlie at heart.
So here we are, all that back and forth and deliberating to end up with probably the most bare-bones personal website to be created in 2025. Just some HTML served from a VM. I am really looking forward to trying new things, technologically and creatively, and who knows where this project will go (if anywhere).