Hugo

This post covers how I self hosted this blog with availability and geo distribution.

Migration to Hugo

I have migrated this 14-year-old blog from a dynamic WordPress (based on WordPress) to a static website (based on Hugo). It was a pretty lengthy process even when I had scripts converting the WordPress XML export into markdown files.

Why a static site?

This gives a few advantages like:

• Must faster rendering as all the pages are generated well in advance & pushed to the server
• Better security (as the backend is not at all exposed unlike WordPress where backend admin portal was visible & behind an authenticated URL)
• Easy to distribute and put behind CDN
• Easy to type posts as now it’s just markdown

I haven’t finalised the hosting location for this newer site. For now, it’s on Google Cloud firebase but I am still just playing with the options. If I get some free time, I might just tweak my PowerDNS setup to start using GeoIP data for the request and serve the local server in a given country. That way I can host the website in India, Europe and US and let authoritative DNS steer the traffic. More on this later!