For the last two weeks, our blog has been down. This was because of some issues we have had with our WordPress host (it was my fault, sort of). The issue came down to me running an Ansible playbook against our VM in Azure. Somehow, this messed something up so that the VM couldn’t boot. Long story short, we now have WordPress running on a Raspberry Pi 3 in my home, with Cloudflare tunnels used to make the site accessible.

What I learned.

Probably the most important thing I learned it that I need regular backups of the database and static content, as well as a recovery plan for when things go wrong. I also learned not to test things on a production server.

The Future

For the short term, I plan on just serving the site from my PI. For the long run, we are working on getting a Droplet on Digital Ocean, or a AWS EC2 instance. We were using an Azure Student Subscription that has problems of its own, so we are looking at properly paying for a VPS to host our site on.

I am also looking at various options for reducing or even removing the need for a WordPress server such as automatically exporting new posts to a static site powered by Cloudflare Pages or IPFS, cross-posting with Matrix, etc. I will not have much time to work on that however as spring break ended Yesterday. I will try to keep everyone updated as time moves on, so follow the blog and our Mastodon Account @[email protected].

Thanks for reading!