Not Self Hosting
Attempting to self host the site
A couple of weeks ago I decided to try self hosting my site on a server from hetzner.com.
I bought the cheapest server they had, just under €4 a month and proceeded to get the server actually hosting my site. This worked very well, but it was a bit hit and miss since I don't know much about Linux. I even managed to get password protection working on private folders. All of this I then managed put together in a number of scripts. With a lot of help from copilot. Or at least I thought I had.
After resetting my server to do a clean build, my scripts started generating errors. Probably I could have fixed them, but it's a lot of hassle for something I was getting for free.
Additionally, I needed a very basic, password protected, php page to be able to trigger a rebuild of the site using a browser. What stumped me were the Linux permissions needed to do this securely. I wanted to trigger a shell script from a php form post. Copilot gave lots of useful help, but couldn't solve my exact problem either. Or maybe I couldn't understand it's instructions. This is a good example of AI being good, but not quite good enough in situations where the person asking copilot is not an expert on the topic AI is helping with. Probably there are better AI tools than Copilot but for now I gave up.
U-turn
In the end I decided to stick with a managed service because:
- It's a lot of effort setting up a server
- It's a lot of effort updating and maintaining a server
- There's no real gain to me or my website from me doing the previous two points
So after a week or so of trying to get my scripts working, I'm still happily running on statichost.eu.