It’s not been quite long enough since I’ve wrote my first article about blog deployment and I already to change quite a lot.

OrangePI 5 is not stable enough

At first, the idea of doing a reliable, always accessible website on the small computer under your TV was stupid. I’ve stumbled upon the power management issues with my USB-attached SSD drive. All of a sudden filesystem became read-only and the whole infrastructure went south. Static deployments were unavailable, as well as analytics. I had to swap the USB-drive in favour of the M2 small NVMe which made the system a lot stabler but still, too unpredictable.

Some changes were required to be done. I’ve split my infrastructure into two several parts: static website deployment and surrounding infrastracture (primarily Plausible self-hosted analytics and the Status Page).

Cloudflare pages

Since partially I’ve already been utilizing Cloudflare services (Zero-trust tunnels and the DNS hosting) I’ve decided to go with the Pages for self-hosting of the Hugo static websites. And oh boy it delivers. With 0$ costs I get an-almost-always available CDN, caching, fast delivery and so on.

I had to adjust my deployment scripts to use the wrangler CLI and that’s it.

Hetzner virtual machine

To host other services I had to purchase a cheap Hetzner Linux box and run my Ansible scripts to provision docker, analytics and some other stuff. It proves to be way more reliable than using the poor Orange PI (even though I have to pay 7 euro per month).

Theme change

Original theme was a little bit too childish to my taste and I did not find an easy way to change the default fornt, so I switched to the hugo-PaperMod theme %). It may look a bit too bland and generic, but still, I seem to like the way it is built more.