For the last 3 years I’ve been hosting this and a few other blogs on a Linode VPS with Nginx. My sites pages are static contents generated using Jekyll so I needed only http service to run the sites, so running a full VPS is simultaneously an overkill and not as robust as I like.

I experimented with cloud storage solutions (e.g. AWS S3) which works quite well except that I needed to also run CloudFront to get HTTPS. Setting it up was a bit of a hustle so I never got around to it.

Fast forward to July 2020, I’m exploring Netlify for Jamstack deployment. Seeing that static web hosting with free HTTPS is specifically supported, I decided to point Netlify to my blog repository on Github to see what happens.

It started building the site, guided me to set up the DNS, and set up the LetsEncrypt certificates automatically for HTTPS. After verifying that the site is indeed working as expected, I moved all my remaining blogs to Netlify and retired the server on Linode.

Netlify is not the only service for HTTPS enabled static sites with CDN. Firebase Hosting seems to be another credible alternative though I have not tried it.

The Netlify experience was so seamless that I am missing very little for my specific use case. Definitely recommended if you need a similar service.