New hosting, or, how I host my website now.
So, I finally decided to make “my website great again”, and host it myself.
Sure, I do own a webhosting company, but, I don’t really like shared webhosting. Sure, it’s useful for some things, but, to be clear - I love tinkering, and shared webhosting is like giving me a prebuilt PC.
Sure, I’ll use a prebuilt PC, but I will lack the enjoyment from building it myself, with my own two hands.
So anyways, here’s actual things and not just my rants.
VPS
Yeah-yeah, I decided to power-off my homelab, as its too inefficient if you look on its power consumption. For the same money I’ve rented an IPv6 only VPS from Hetzner.
On the VPS, I’ve setup Portainer, which I use to manage my docker containers, and a proxy - nginx, which I use to allow Cloudflare to pick-up on all sorts of different services I have/will have.
Honestly, it looks scrappy, and it is scrappy, but if it works - it just works, and builds in approximately 0.5 seconds, which is just amazing.
Plus I’ve set up the container in such way, that it just builds the website, and then turns off, so it’s not really using much in terms of resources.
Struggles of IPv6
Adaptation
Sure, IPv6 is a really good technology, but, no provider in Ukraine actually supports it. Moreover, as Google says, there’s still less than 50% IPv6 adoption across all the world, and in Ukraine its close to 19.4%, which is low.
Why do we even need IPv6? We already have IPv4, right? Well, no. We’ve exceeded the max amount IPv4 addresses, as they were in fact finite, and we’ve reached the limits by February 3rd, 2011. Yet the IPv6 appeared long before we actually ran out of IPv4 IPs, as the concern that with growing userbase of internet we could run out of IP addresses was raised in around 2000s.
Yet, the one thing thats stopping IPv6 from being adopted, is that most providers and websites still don’t support it. That’s right, a multi-billion company GitHub can’t afford to support IPv6, so you have to use proxies to actually use their shitty service.
Human UNfriendliness
So, we all know the 8.8.8.8, 7.7.7.7 or 1.1.1.1, right? Easy to remember, easy to type. But then there’s this fucking thing 2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334, which then can be shortened to 2001:db8::1, but either way - its too human unfriendly.
We have a little monkey brain, which sadly cannot memorise a stew of numbers and letters, and I’m not even talking about writing the IPv6 addresses, as it’s just a tee bit hard - you have to reach here-there-here-there, and there’s a lot more room for error, than with 4 sections with 3 numbers maximum.
So, it makes DNS even more important, I mean, it is still important - you’re not going to my VPS’s IP to access this website, but it will be even more relevant in local networks, as it will be just impossible to type in hundreds of addresses.
But, I really love that instead of localhost there’s just ::1, or [::1]:{port} if you want to add a port. Much cleaner than 127.0.0.1 or localhost.
Conclusion
So, that was a fun experiment, and I guess I’ll keep my website like that, as I don’t really like the way Codeberg Pages are right now, as they’re really unstable, and that’s a pity.
And don’t get me wrong with my “Struggles of IPv6” section - I love the idea of IPv6, but its not flawless too.