I started my journey into self-hosting this year, and there are so, so many things I want to keep track of. Plus, I accidentally bought too many VPSs this Black Friday, so now I have a bunch of idlers. I decided to put one of the idles to use (so it’s not an idler anymore) for this website. I’ll also be including some affiliate/referral links to support buying even more idlers to test out and tinker with 🤣
Personal ramblings will be posted at https://smallpancakes.nekoweb.org (I absolutely love that site’s design, please check it out and its an English site), while this site will focus mainly on self-hosting stuff.
As the first post on this site, I want to document how the site was built.
Domain
I bought the domain on Dynadot (aff) for $18 USD. I recently discovered that Gandi’s price hikes have gotten way out of hand, so I’m never buying domains from Gandi again! I’ll write another post later sharing just how ridiculous the price difference is.
My main registrar right now is Porkbun, but they didn’t offer .tw domains in the past, so I forgot to double-check and just bought it directly on Dynadot. Dynadot’s online reviews are pretty positive, though it feels like it’s more for people who buy and sell domains in bulk since they have a built-in marketplace.
Later on, I realized that Porkbun actually supports .tw now. I’ll wait 60 days and then transfer it over to Porkbun. Currently, it looks like the transfer cost is $16.29 USD and renewal is $17.29 USD.
Hosting
I grabbed a HostHatch (aff) Black Friday Japan Special: 2c8g for $100 USD/3 years. That’s actually $2.78 USD a month. I’ll add a Benchmark link later. Since the server is in Japan, I didn’t want to route it through Cloudflare. Cloudflare’s free proxy would reroute traffic all the way to the US West Coast, causing latency to jump from 40ms to over 130ms.
Website
I used the Dokploy WordPress template and swapped the database to MariaDB. It’s not the most ideal setup, but I wanted to get the site up and running first. I added some simple security and caching, then quickly jot down this post to document things before I forget!
So far, I’m very impressed with the speed of the website. I don’t know how it is for you as everything is located in Japan. If it’s slow, let me know in the comments. If I make any adjustments later, I’ll also update them here.