New Host, Same Site | Updates & Stuff #1

by Brandon Giesing

Welcome to the first of a series of update posts I'll be doing occasionally! This week, the site and email has been migrated to a new host

New Host

I've moved the site off of Ghosted and my Email off of ProtonMail. Now I'm using NearlyFreeSpeech and Gmail. Overall this should allow me to provide the same site for way less money and have more control over it.

Why switch?

While Ghosted was a quick and simple way to get Ghost up and running, there was a few things that made me want to switch.

  1. The service costs $50 a year. Even though that's only $5 a month which isn't that bad for most sites, for a site that rarely has visitors like this one that's way too expensive for my needs.
  2. Ghosted is really slow about updating their sites to the latest version. Yes you might not want to be on the latest release ASAP to ensure the site doesn't break, I was 5 versions behind and new versions come out once or twice each month which is unacceptable due to security reasons.
  3. While I likely won't need much stuff, since Ghosted only has Ghost, I can't setup other things without a separate host. At that point why pay for two hosts?

NearlyFreeSpeech solves the above problems:

  1. Since it uses pay-as-you-go pricing and my site get's very few visitors, it should only cost about $15/year! Way less than the $50 I was paying Ghosted. (Of course, more visitors could make it more than $50 but that would be unlikely for now considering my usage)
  2. Since I control the whole server myself, I choose when to upgrade.
  3. I can host anything I want from files, images, and other apps (things like link shortners, other CMSes like Wordpress, etc.) if I ever want to.

Check out NearlyFreeSpeech

ProtonMail meanwhile was a good encrypted email provider and is definitely more secure than Gmail but:

  1. $48/year is overkill when you barely use email.
  2. I rarely ever send and receive email to people, most of what I get in my inbox is newsletters and I've not had anybody who I could send encrypted messages to as is. Why pay $48/year for just newsletters and encryption you can't really use?
  3. I would love to use some services like Unroll.me for instance that can't work with ProtonMail cause the very nature of its encrypted services and no IMAP/Pop

Gmail on the other hand might not be as private but I do personally trust Google unlike many others and:

  1. It's free! Since my domain is through Google Domains, I get free email forwarding that also allows messages to be sent through Gmail and show up as my domain without having to pay for G Suite.
  2. Obviously, I can still encrypt messages if needed without paying the ProtonMail prices and with Gmail, I have basically unlimited storage and alias unlike ProtonMail's 5GB and 5 alias.
  3. It's Gmail which basically all email integrations work with either with Google Login or direct IMAP/POP access.

Money Routine

Since the Nepdate, I've split out Perk to a separate tips page like I said I would but otherwise, I've not done all I said:

  • I split only one tips page out when I was gonna do it for most of the sites
  • Didn't make it a full on multi-page guide

Both are still coming eventually but I have made a lot of updates since then including:

  • Moving earnings to an auto-updating spreadsheet to update the earnings in real-time instead of after months.
  • Reducing page length via collapsing some stuff
  • Giving info about each and adding a lot more app types

Other Stuff

  • I added the project page like I said in the Nepdate
  • Worked on optimizing the site a lot.
    • Compressed Images
    • Modified the Mapache theme to remove some unneeded stuff and load things async-ly if possible
    • Reduced ads
  • Still need to work on posting more

That's it for this update! I'm gonna continue to work on doing more stuff so stay tuned!