Back To A Shared Host For Now

I really enjoy the hobby aspect of a VPS but with seeing some recent security things I decided I wanted to take a break from that for a bit. AI is finding vulnerabilities quickly these days.

The recent ones would not have affected me directly. Maybe the VPS host but not me directly. At least they wouldn’t have affected me in a way I could handle except maybe losing my static files which are published anyway.

I stumbled onto NearlyFreeSpeech.NET very recently. I have seen the name before and I know they have been around for a very long time. Looking through their terms and at other people’s thoughts they seemed to be very aligned with what I think a web host should be. That was one of the reasons I was using the most recent VPS provider.

This service might cost me slightly more but it is pay for only what you use. Having someone else be concerned with the security and all that fun stuff is worth something to me.

A very big selling point for me is that it is not Cpanel. I find Cpanel to be very clunky to use and it does add cost for something I don’t want or need. A recent shared host also offered Directadmin. I didn’t like that either. This new host seems to be more old school. It just has what I want without being pretty.

An added bonus for me was to learn that it runs on FreeBSD rather than Linux! That is just a strong preference to me. I guess when using a shared host it does not really matter but it was a nice surprise.

By the time this is published everything is already moved. Who knows how long this will last? Maybe years or maybe days. I move things around a lot. I like to try new services and don’t settle in one place. That is how I am with life in general though. I like to try new things and ideas often.

As is typical with me I did this with no plan and not even considering moving beforehand. I just woke up and saw something new and shiny and jumped on it. Occasionally that spontaneity backfires on me and breaks something but that wasn’t the case with this move.

The great thing about this site being statically generated is I can take it anywhere. I can do that with ease too. It was a simple rsync and update the DNS. I may leave this site on a shared host and just get a VPS to self host mastodon or something later. Time will tell. It is just so nice to have so many options depending on how hands-on I want things to be. I have a strong feeling I will miss the tinkering around with the software.