Written by Mitchell Scott
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Hosting My Own Things, part 3

This is a post in the Hosting My Own Things series:


It’s been a little over six years since my last “Hosting My Own Things” post. In that time, my home network and hosting setup has changed drastically multiple times.

When I posted last, this blog was a WordPress site running inside VirtualBox on my 2009 Mac Pro. The first large change was from VirtualBox to VMware ESXi later in 2016 since I was working more with VMware during my day job at the time.

In 2018, I migrated from the Mac Pro hardware to two Dell R610 rackmount servers that I obtained from a client I was helping with a big datacenter upgrade. They each have two six-core CPUs and 96 GB of RAM. I’ve got around 50 TB of raw storage in two Synology NASes providing storage for various media, as well as the VMware datastores.

Last year, I started dabbling with Docker containers and Kubernetes. The Kubernetes nodes are still running on the same hardware and storage with VMware underneath, but I started the slow migration of my many home services from full VMs to containers.

This blog is one of the last services to be migrated, as my WordPress version had reached a vintage I wasn’t comfortable exposing to the Internet. After a couple failed upgrade / migration attempts, I decided to give Hugo a try. Hugo is a static site generator, it takes all of my posts (in Markdown), and renders out static HTML. Paired with some Continuous Deployment actions, I should be able to deploy my site automatically into Kubernetes every time I push a commit to the git repo where the content lives. I used a WordPress plugin to export my posts and content to the format Hugo uses. This mostly worked, but I had to do a little manual cleanup to get images working, and I need to play around with image galleries. Hopefully I’ll start using this blog more and my next post isn’t another six years away!