How is that Website Built?

Updates

• 2021-04-11 Added video hosting

Hosting and CMS

I’ve gotten a few questions hence it’s simpler to answer as a new post. This website uses the WordPress.org CMS hosted at Planethoster.

• hosting: Planethoster. With their “World” service you get for 6€/month as many websites as you want on the same server, unlimited space, and 8 CPU, 16GB RAM, and more processing resources on request.
  • bonuses:
    • French spoken!
    • datacenters in both France and Canada.
    • blazingly fast and kind support (Yes I’m a newbie at webhosting, and anyhow I love to be treated nicely)
• CMS: WordPress.org. This means my blog is built from the open-source WordPress.org CMS, on Planethoster servers.
  • you could also use WordPress.com which offers integrated hosting. But from my point of view there are limitations in order to push you towards the higher hosting plans.
  • Hence using WordPress.org CMS on Planethoster hosting gives me better value and flexibility

I am amazed at the possibilities and ease of use of these technologies. I used the integrated WordPress configurator from Planethoster and got this website quite easily running. This theme is even the standard one, I like the greenish background it’s easy on my eyes:

Newsletter

Since this blog is not selling anything, I did not want to spend upwards of 200.-CHF/year just for emailing my friends whenever there is a new article. Yes, a lot of genius marketing tools are quite pricy. The free mailchimp plan covers me up to 2000 subscribers which gives room to grow, to say the least.

Ideally I would like to embed the registration form on my website but I could not get it to work for now, hence I use the mailchimp registration landing page, with the same background color. Not perfect, but it does the job for now.

Video Hosting

I tried to upload a short 13MB video and it did not work. Hopefully. After browsing a bit it looks like it’s a terrible idea to host videos on the same server processing the webpage. I found this article explaining the different options for hosting videos which I recommend. For now I try vimeo.

I’ll update this page as I grow wiser.