Today, I took one more step from the software as a service (SaaS) dependence of Wix. I relaunched my app’s website and my wife’s personal site, and both are hosted locally. After hours of trial and error launching the first site to cut the Saas cord (this one), my wife’s site and my apps site (VP Location) had an uneventful transition.
Unlike christopherbwilliams.com, the above-mentioned sites are launched on their own Ubuntu Server virtual machines, which are running in a light hypervisor powered by Truenas (all free.) I’m not simply trading one internet master for another… I’m truly putting in control of my site.
In case you’re thinking about this, it’s important to know that this shift isn’t easy. I’m using WordPress to build each of these sites, and it’s quite the learning curve. I’m still learning how to generate new pages and get them perfectly formatted for display. The app’s page will be a bit more difficult because I’ll need to integrate Google Maps API, (and others) to enable full functionality. For now, I’m excited about the money we’re saving by hosting these sites ourselves.