Weekly Update 25: Enhancements to the blog!
I think this has been the quickest week so far this year. It’s like time has flown by, and I finally got a chance to think about the past few years and the growth I’ve been able to experience. I’m very thankful for everything and everyone in my life. This last week has been up and down in terms of stress, but at the end of the day it’s been worth it.
My business continues to grow, I’ve received $1000 in NRC that I’m reinvesting back into the business this year! This will definitely cover the cost of some visual face-lifts, marketing and sale pitches. I’m hoping next year to seek investment from the BDC and possibly angel investment money. I see a huge potential for growth in this niche that none of the direct competitors in the general industry have done.
On the personal side of things, I’ve made some enhancements to my blog. I’ve been using nginx and proxying through to apache for wordpress, but decided to strip down my setup. I’m now running LiteSpeed directly with lscache for wordpress and I’m seeing huge improvements over my previous nginx/apache setup! You should find the blog is noticeably faster over the coming days, as I’m still iterating and testing all the lscache options available. A big improvement was minifying all the assets, including HTML and enabling lazy-loading along with preloading css/js assets!
My most recent post on Restic and DirectAdmin also saw huge traffic spike that would’ve surely made this blog incredibly slow to access, but thanks to LiteSpeed & lscache, along with Cloudflare in front everything hummed away. My next experiment is going to be offloading assets to BunnyCDN directly (mainly images), enabling Cloudflare Argo Smart Routing and Railgun over the next six months to see if this provides an improvement.
Server-side for this blog, my shared virtual machine for this blog has outgrown the specifications, so I’ve decided to devote a dedicated server to hosting web, dns and email! This site is now on a dedicated machine (32 GB memory, E5v2 CPU) and will run:
- This blog
- My business site
- My wife’s blog
- Family emails
- Backup DNS
I was hesitant on DNS at first, but I decided it would be a good idea to run it as a fallback. Now my DNS goes through Cloudflare, however, there are a few domains I do not want to use Cloudflare DNS for, so my next project will be setting up virtual machines in Toronto, California, Germany (Vultr) and running DNS on them. I’m thinking PowerDNS and having my current DirectAdmin DNS server push out configurations somehow. I imagine just a programmable API would let me do that. I imagine I could also run DirectAdmin Personal license instances on them all and do DNS exclusively.
Nonetheless, I’ve got lots in store and I can’t wait to get it all together and share it! Thank you to my readers for following my blog, I’ll keep producing more and more content over the years, so stick around!