I’ve written before about how I deploy this blog using Drone.io. It works well, and does exactly what you’d expect.

Lately I’ve started looking into reducing complexity in homelab systems that I use — and using “a Continuous Integration platform for busy development teams” felt a bit overkill for this tiny blog.

So I switched to something simple; GNU Make.

I’m hosting this blog on AWS S3 and Cloudfront. One disadvantage with S3 is that it doesn’t have a simple way of creating redirects — like Netlify, Firebase, or even Nginx.

But there is way; using the AWS CLI, put-object, and the x-amz-website-redirect-location metadata.

Here’s how 👇

On Tuesday August 24th I posted a link to my Running underground CAT6 to detached garage post on the r/homelab subreddit. The Reddit post got lots of upvotes and comments — and started climbing on the r/homelab front page.

This generated a spike of traffic like I have never gotten before. In this post I’m going through some numbers; like performance, traffic and cost.

This blog is built with Hugo — an open-source static site generator. Static websites require no server side processing, which makes them easier to host and opens up new hosting possibilities.

There are many options out there, but I deploy my website to AWS S3, using CloudFront to distribute it globally (aka. make it fast).

Here is the why and the how.

In my previous post I wrote about turning Hugo aliases into Firebase redirects. Now — let’s convert them into a Nginx map file, and have Nginx redirect based on that file.