My blogging has been ad hoc for a while now – mainly because I’ve being doing other things with my time, but also because a lot of the things I would have written about need careful curation before posting, the internet and the church being what they are.
But one thing I have done, but haven’t mentioned at all, is completely restructured my hosting arrangements for eutony.net and family.
The infrastructure previously had a lot of moving parts – I had Ionos for inbound mail, Amazon SES for outbound mail (because Ionos don’t offer DKIM and DMARC), then domain registration with Dreamhost, Cloudflare in the mix as well. Then of course the website mainly hosted on Raspberry Pi’s sitting on my shelf. This essentially worked, but it did seem to break fairly often, and having had to completely rebuild the Pis a couple of time I got a bit bored!
Instead of all this, I have pumped for a single host provider – Krystal.io (if you use referral code EUTONY we both get £10 off). It means my domain registration, hosting*, and e-mail are now all in one place. DNS is still Cloudflare.
I like that Krystal are UK based, have a priority on ethics and the environment, and they’ve been really good to work with.
I first of all migrated another domain/website I’m responsible for (Harrogate School of Theology and Mission), and it went so well that I fully jumped aboard.
*Eutony.net front end is actually now hosted by Vercel directly. The site has been built in nextjs for a while, but the headless WordPress on the Pi wasn’t playing nicely with the nextjs servers. However, now that the headless WordPress is on the Krystal servers, it’s all working really well. I particularly like how the sites auto-deploy/update from git commits.
photo.eutony.net is still on a pi, because I very quickly ran out of enthusiasm and patience trying to get it run on the Krystal servers. I might revisit it again one day.