So, I’ve used a bunch of blogging platforms over the years, and not really liked most of them.

I used to host a website for software I’d written and my CV, but that got overtaken by github.com quite a while back, and it seemed like now was a good time to self-host.

hugo seems worthy and so this site is developed in it, by hacking the texify 2 theme to do a little more of what I want - in particular, I prefer monospace to serif fonts.

The CL-EM-SE supervision site runs on fly.io via GHCR GHAs (https://github.com/rrw1000/wikijs-sup) .

So, now seems like a good time to look at hosting options:

• Do it myself: would work (I have a VPS via Mythic beasts, who I strongly recommend), but it’s a larger attack surface for that VPS, hosting containers is memory intensive, and TLS renewal is kinda tedious.

• Cloud providers are kinda like fly.io, but more expensive, harder to work with, and slower. Unless you really enjoy spending your money on enterprise devops, just don’t (at any scale these days, really).

• https://www.shuttle.rs/ - nice, but this isn’t a rust service and it seems like overkill to write one just for this (read: I’d enjoy it, but I have lecture notes to read ..)

• Various others (nhost.io] who look vaguely interesting.

• fly.io and render.com both seem to come decently recommended, so let’s try render since I already have a service running on fly (who, btw, were always pretty good and do seem to be making quite a lot of progress - https://fly.io/blog/ is a good read, in the main)

This turns out to be moderately nifty - render is trying to be heroku fairly hard, but does (ultimately) support IAC via blueprints, and the trick of putting a render.yaml in the same repo you’re trying to ship seems to work fine.

That said, both fly and render tend towards k8s as deployments get more complex; I can’t help thinking that this is a problem with the way we write software rather than a problem with k8s - we end up building more and more complex mechanisms for diminishing benefit until we end up with something very marginally better than the last thing in return for a great deal more effort.

But more of that in a future post …