If you're at all curious about how this site came together, you came to the right place.
Hosting
stephenbolen.com is hosted at RackNerd on a 3 GB Ryzen 7950X VPS that I bought on Black Friday 2023 for the low low price of $45.00 USD per year (that's $3.75/mo!). It's hosted in their Chicago datacenter, and is ridiculously performant here in St. Louis, and hopefully in your neck of the woods, too.
It's hard to beat the RackNerd Black Friday deals. Check 'em out.
Domain
It started with GoDaddy way back in the late 90s. Then I moved everything to NameCheap after GoDaddy's CEO Bob Parsons went elephant hunting in Africa.
Now I'm hosting through Cloudflare, which is cheap (at cost!) and easy. I'm already using Cloudflare on all of my domains, I may as well just remove the middleman.
At-cost domains are a rare commodity nowadays.
Software
I made the decision to switch StephenBolen.com from WordPress to Ghost for a few reasons:
- System bloat with WordPress.
- Too many plugins, too many updates, too much of a Digital Ocean droplet resource pinch.
- Hyper-focus on privacy.
To be fair, there are a lot of great things about WordPress. It's generally easy to set up and use, it's 100% open source, and there's a rich tapestry of both themes and plugins to enhance the experience for site owners and visitors.
Where I really got tripped up, though, was how slow WordPress would run on that same $6/mo Digital Ocean instance that I referenced above. Ghost's marketing page "Ghost vs. WordPress" lays this pretty bare: Ghost is - thanks to running on node.js - is up to 1900% faster:
I ran a Google Page Speed test on the site - and even with a Ghost Theme that, for all intents and purposes, should slow the rendering down - still scored insanely high:
I highly recommend Ghost as a publishing platform.
You can self-host like me, or pay for all of that messy stuff to be managed for you.
Theme
Look, I haven't done any website design or development for ages. I don't have time for that, as I detailed OnHere™ with my post "On Maintenance." With that in mind, I turned to ThemeForest and purchased the Ghost theme Arun.
It was incredibly simple to set up and customize. I really love it.