Hello, again. This is a relaunch of my website due to a variety of reasons. Maybe because I was bored, my last site had too much flourish, or I wanted a site I could make my own.  While these were all important in my decision, it primarily came down to two specific items.

• Expenses with Bluehost
• Challenge my technical abilities

Like many things, I wanted a product that fit my needs or provided something new. So, the increase in costs was a motivating factor in leaving Bluehost. Now, I get to play around with some new toys, such as advanced web frameworks, cloud storage solutions, and deployment automation tools. I will quickly dive into these items, but there will be further detail in future posts.

Expenses

While Bluehost was relatively easy with a single cost to pay, the expenses quickly escalated over the last 5 years. I have been with them since 2011. At that time, it was $2.50 monthly and $7.50 per year per domain renewal. The total cost was manageable, especially as I was still in college. However, in the last 3 or 4 years, Bluehost’s prices soared to $16 a month. The additional domain registration costs only added to the financial strain. So, I began to explore other options, which led me to discover a new solution. This brings me to the technical aspect.

Technical Challenge

It is easy to run a WordPress site from a provider like Bluehost. Very little complexity, drag and drop, no code needed. In fact, these hosting providers make it a point to advertise that fact. My first few websites were this design.

Embracing these new, complex tools was a challenge, but as they say, without pain, there is no growth. I wanted to push my technical abilities and learn new skills, and this website relaunch was the perfect opportunity to do so.

So, I stacked up a few solutions to make it a little more fun.

• AstroJS as the web framework
• GitHub for managing changes
• GitHub Actions/Workflows for site deployment
• AWS S3 to store the Site
• Cloudflare for serving up the site

So far, the process of deploying this new site has been a journey, and I can’t wait to share some of the technical details with you all!