In a fit of preciousness, last week I migrated this site over to The Latest Hotness which appears to be Netlify. Previously it was hosted on GitHub Pages, where it has been for seven years. But since I was changing domain names anyways, why not give it a go?
Netlify’s onboarding experience and documentation was buttery smooth. I was able to get deploys up and running in minutes. Just had to point Netlify to my GitHub repo, and off it went. I was impressed Netlify knew I was using Hugo and autosuggested the command to use for deploys.
I think the most time consuming part was actually getting Netlify to find my GitHub repo; I had to do the adding access dance a few times for some reason ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The only other quirk was I had previously set up email-forwarding from the custom domain name to my personal email. Since I now pointed to Netlify’s name servers, my previous configuration didn’t work anymore, I now had to configure the MX records on Netlify’s side and it appears they don’t handle email alias forwarding directly.
After some searching, I went with ImprovMX. If Netlify was buttery smooth, then this was… easy as whipped cream? This setup was even simpler, just had to copy their configurations in the docs and we were good to go.
Not much point of this post, just impressed with what’s available free nowadays. We’ve come a long way from the banner-ridden GeoCities and Angelfire pages.