Published on: 29th January 2023
I thought I’d write a couple of articles about how this site is set up and why I’m doing it like this at all. After all there are plenty of great website hosts out there and it’s easy to get set up with them.
Let’s start with the hardware. For years/ever it’s been possible to rent a server in real or virtual form: contact a hosting provider, sign some contracts and away you go. The prices have always been higher than I’d want to pay and ex VAT which gives away that it’s usually business who require this service. Not always, but usually.
I think that Mythic Beasts (MB) have some sort of understanding with the Rasberry Pi foundation. They once bet the founder of RPi that they could host the Pi website using just Raspberry Pis (they succeeded!) and the Pi website recently published a guide on how to host a Mastodon instance using a Pi at MB. Anyway, MB offer Pi hosting starting at £6.90 per month including VAT. I couldn’t resist and decided to rent a 4GB Pi4 with some extra space for storing files.
It’s best to make clear at this point that I’m not sponsored by MB (or the Pi Foundation) and am paying for everything myself. I’m just really happy with the deal.
So somewhere in London there’s a Pi with my name on it (so to speak). That’s a promising start but I’ll be needing some software with that. I’ll talk more about that in other articles.