New site - all very shiny
This represents a new start for my online presence; right from the earliest days of my original blog (which has since been stowed away, mainly because most of the links don't work any more!) I have been hosting my online content from my home internet connection, using either a small PC or - latterly - a Raspberry Pi 4B.
This has been fine up to now, but, as cybersecurity becomes more of a concern, allowing the entire internet into my home to access a publicly available site no longer seems to be a particularly good idea.
What's rather marvellous is that Oracle has seen fit to provide an 'always free' Virtual Server on their Oracle Cloud platform, which fits the bill perfectly as a hosting platform for a website, so I've taken good advantage of that.
It's also giving me the opportunity to learn more about modern things like Docker containers (which I'm using to run this), so it's a win-win really; I would very much recommend it for anyone who wants to get to know how things work in the cloud, but doesn't want to risk a large bill from Amazon or Google if they leave a machine running!
I'm running this site on a platform called Ghost which was recommended to me by Chris - it comes as a Docker Container deployment and didn't take much configuring to get it working with the other bits and pieces I've got running (more on them sometime, I'm sure!) It's elegant and easy to use, but I'm not sure I've quite got the hang of it yet...