Moving my blog host

Chad has generously hosted my blog on his personal servers since 2016. Thank you Chad! He said his server was getting old and asked me to migrate it. My site was down for about a week while I tried different things (you probably didn’t notice :-))

Before that I was on the retired Geekswithblogs.net at https://www.geekswithblogs.net/aligned , which you could see with the Way Back Machine if you wanted.

My blog is very simple and created with Hugo . I write my articles in Markdown and Hugo.exe creates html out of it. It’s very slick.

DNS

I don’t deal with DNS much. I thought I could set it once and get it right, but I was wrong this time. I always get impatient waiting for propogation.

Result: My site was down for about a week and I was frustrated.

Lessons Learned:

1. Remember that you have Cloudflare before you change your DNS your DNS provider (Namecheap for me).
2. Make sure you know what you are doing before you change settings and save.
3. Don’t do it on the side, it will probably require real attention.
4. Be patient and prepared to wait for the propogation.

Azure Static Web App attempt

I’m familiar with Azure and have an account, so I thought that would be the ideal solution for me. The instructions were straightforward. I had a static website from my Azure DevOps repo up and running without problems.

I ran into DNS issues and still don’t know why. I asked Azure Support for help on Twitter and you can see more details there. I must have done something wrong.

After a few days of trying and re-trying, I gave up on Azure Static Web apps.

Lesson Learned: Things don’t always go as expected, even when you ask for help. Details are important

Cloudflare Pages

I then found that Cloudflare has pages . I created a private repo in Github and setup the publish with Cloudflare. It was quick and easy.

Then I changed the DNS as suggested.

It has a lot of nice features and I decide it’s analytics was enough that I turned off Google Analytics. Bonus: that’s one less tracking of you (but you could use the Brave browser and avoid even more)

Tools to check DNS

https://digwebinterface.com/?hostnames=aligneddev.net

https://dnschecker.org/#SOA/aligneddev.net