Goodbye 🇺🇸
It’s sad to have to say this - but in the current circumstances relying on any hosting service being located in the United States of America is something you (I) want to avoid. I have been prefering local European services already in the past but some I still put on American servers - including all my blogs I have built based on Hugo which I used to host on Netlify.
I now have moved all of them (see below) to the European provider statichost.eu - which was super easy as they are built automatically from the Git repos - for some more details see below.
The blogs and homepages I have moved away are:
- svenwal.de (this page)
- exmo.travel (our page dedicated to our world travel tour)
- bio.walther.world and
- www.gibts-doch-garnicht.de (very old German blog of mine)
How did the move happen?
First of all as everything is in GitHub and Hugo already I could have moved on the spot - but took the opportunity to also update all of them to the latest Hugo versio (0.145) which sometimes included updaing some of the template files.
So on my local laptop I checked the repos out and using hugo serve -D tweaked them until they rendered locally as expected.
Next I created an account at https://builder.statichost.eu/signup and started by adding site by site using their link to the GitHub repo Url (like https://github.com/svenwal/svenwal.de.git for this page here).
For the domain handling I created a a file called statichost.yml in the root of the repo (see this one as example for this page) which contains the to be used Hugo version (there is a long list of options - the ci one worked the best for me).
After the build works the final step was to switch the DNS over from Netlify to statichost.eu and boom here we are.
Hint on build issues because of templates as git submodule
Ever since I have used automation for building with referencing an external template I had issues getting the local rendering in sync with the one from auto-generation. Based on some hint by the exceptional great support by statichost.eu (thanks Eric!) I moved over to referencing them as Hugo module instead and since then everything works flawlessly.
One more thing
Added the info about this also to the README.md of every project including the badge if last export has completed.
