This site is hosted through GitHub Pages. As of writing this, I haven’t used Git very much, so I’m learning quite a bit about how it works and how to use it. I have also never used Ruby, and the few hours I’ve spent fiddling with all this has not been enough to fully understand how it works, so bear with me if some things don’t look quite right. Fortunately I have used HTML/CSS quite a bit before so I’m not entirely lost.

I put a lot of consideration into the various options for hosting before I decided to host on GitHub, and here was what I found:

  1. Paying for hosting on some big platform
    • On one hand, this would probably give me access to a website builder and I would be doing less fiddling with the actual source code. But on the other hand, I do like fiddling with the code and I’m learning a lot.
    • Also, hosting is expensive. All the non-free options cost ~$50-$60 a year. Some have free or discounted trials, but I’d already paying for a domain; I don’t want to have to pay for hosting too, especially when free options are available.
  2. Paying for VPS hosting using something like Vultr
    • This would be quite cool, and substantially more technically complex than this because I’d be running the actual server in charge of doing the hosting. But it’s equally expensive and frankly I do enough work outside my personal projects with hosting and networking as is.
  3. Self hosting on my hobby Linux PC
    • Very cool, probably not very expensive, but almost certainly going to result in something bad happening. A friend suggested using Cloudflare tunnels to host, but to be honest I don’t trust my apartment Wi-Fi enough to have it holding up my personal website.

GitHub Pages currently fills the niche of

  • Free
  • More technically complex than managed hosting, but not overly complex to use and maintain
  • Well integrated with technical things I’d like to learn more about (i.e. Git)

Of course, there are some limitations to using Pages, but at present I’m not at any risk of violating the main ones. I’m not selling anything, I don’t think this site is ever going to be larger than a gigabyte, and I doubt I’m ever doing to be doing more than 100GB a month in terms of bandwidth. If any of these conditions ever changes then I’ll probably also not be worried about the cost of any of the other hosting methods.

As for the formatting, I’m using Jekyll with the Minima theme. I think it looks much cleaner than any of the default Pages themes using Jekyll. However, the GitHub Pages version of Minima is woefully out of date; one of my first priorities is updating that somehow (especially for dark mode support). I’ve considered doing my own custom HTML/CSS/JS theme, but that would take a lot of time to make.

I’ll keep this page updated if anything changes.

shbarnes