One thing I’ve been wondering lately is, do I need to actually run a server to maintain this, admittedly barebones, blog and, more importantly, my email? Right now, I do maintain a server.
The server is pretty small, and it lives in the “cloud,” which is nice compared to having to keep the power on at home all the time and fight with my ISP to hold a static IP address. But I have to pay a certain amount of money to keep the server running. More importantly, I have to maintain that server: worry about patching it, check for people trying to hack in (of which there are about 100 an hour), &c. The real problem is dealing with the anti-spam measures that ISPs and e-mail providers enforce. It’s a real pain making sure that e-mail from my server is actually accepted by the main e-mail providers.1
So, is there a way to avoid this server maintenance while maintaining both this delightful blog and my e-mail? I’m trying out Netlify to see if that’s sufficient for hosting the blog. Then, it’ll be time to try out a hosting provider e-mail. Ideally, it’ll be cheap, easy, and decent at filtering spam.
- Fun fact: Google is a lot looser about these things than Microsoft is. I guess that makes sense but only a posteriori. [return]