A while back I had bought a domain for my email, and I thought “I should write a blog about creating a blog”. At first I hosted it in GitHub Pages, but then I realized I have a perfectly good Raspberry Pi. It’s not like I’m ever gonna get a lot of traffic… so why not self-host?
That sent me into a very deep rabbit hole. How do I make sure my website doesn’t go down if my IP address changes (no static IPs for me, sadly)? How do I create and automatically renew a certificate? How do I achieve high availability?
A few years passed, and now I have a cluster of a few Raspberry Pis running Docker Swarm, managed by Portainer, with stacks running multiple websites and services I self-host. I’ve learned a lot!
My next move is going to be a full overhaul: Docker Swarm is blocking me from setting up some things the way I want to, so I want to build a new cluster using Kubernetes. I’ll use the opportunity to overhaul the network layout as well.
The funniest part is that I haven’t written a single blog post in 3 years. I wanted to add responsive images so I could add diagrams and photos. Somewhere along the way I realized I shaved too many yaks.