Today marks the day that I pull the plug on the GCP instance that has been the host of this blog for about 3.5 years. The reason why is simple - GCP made changes in how billing of external IP addresses works, meaning I wouldn’t be able to uphold one of the core principles behind this website - that everything runs in a free tier.

Unfortunately, that means I will lose some functionality that came with running Wordpress - and if I really want to keep that functionality, I will have to put in some work to replace what was lost.

Luckily, as you can observe by reading this - the core functionality of my Wordpress site is all here. And it didn’t take much effort to get it set up. In fact, I got everything from a local development environment, to a live SSL encrypted site on my domain auto built and deployed on commits to a private git repository set up in the lesser part of an evening. And even then, the only time-consuming part was editing images to fit the new page format.

In any case, the tech stack (LAMP) required to run something like Wordpress is pretty hefty. It is much more powerful than what I ever required it to be. So building my website out of something simpler is something that always had been on my mind. Also, Wordpress is running PHP, which, mildly put, isn’t something I ever was a fan of.

So, going forward, the look and feel of this site might change. What you see now is basically one of the first themes I tried building this site with. I might try on some other variations - introducing different frameworks or tools. And with the new setup, changing the site is actually quite easy. It’s practically a git commit away.