2022-07-21

Reconstruction of My Site part 2

As mentioned in my previous post, I finally setup my new website in the current location.

In addition of cleaning up my website from malicious code, this also gives my opportunity to learn new things. First of all, I decided to use a VPS to host my website now rather than using a shared hosting. Using a VPS means that I have to configure most of the things by myself in order to get the website running. But on the positive side, I have a lot of control on my server setup.

Second, I move away from using Wordpress and using much simpler CMS. Wordpress is fine and allow relatively easy to get a website up and running. Most hosting company that I know provides Wordpress shared hosting or with very easy installation of Wordpress. Other than my bad experience with my website being hacked, I move away from Wordpress because:

• Worpress is too big and difficult to understand. It will need to spend much more time understand what happen inside Wordpress and customize or even protect my website the way I want it.
• Wordpress have many features that I do not need for my site.

In the process of setting up my website, I learn quite a number of things:

• I learn how to setup a VPS server. It is not much different that setting up your own server at home, but since it is not physically accessible to me, I need to be extra careful. There are also some additional security need to be configured in the VPS server since it is exposed to internet. I did many of the configuration on my local server to test it out before moving it to the VPS.
• I learn how to configure the DNS and point to my server correctly. This steps was not needed I buy the domain name and and the hosting together with the same company.
• I learn to setup the webserver and the necessary components. I am not confident that my server configuration is secure enough, so I will not disclose it here. :-)
• I learn to setup SSL for my site.
• I learned quite a bit about HTML and CSS since I configured the CMS for my website.
• I also need to setup new workflow to write each post in my website and learn how to write/publish the blogs using the CMS I have chosen. It is obviously much different than using Wordpress.
• Migrating my old website/post to the new CMS means that I need to some adjustment to the old post as well.

So far, I am quite satisfied with result and what I learn in the process for this first step. Of course, there are still many things need to improved.