Writing this, I realize that I should’ve bought a VPS sooner. For some reason, I get intimidated when doing online purchases, especially since it seemed like a big responsibility. Until I found out that you can get one for cheap.

Apparently, the Hetzner + PHP stack gets a lot of hype from developer circles due to it being worth $5 a month. Hetzner doesn’t have any servers in Southeast Asia, so I chose between Vultr and OVHCloud instead. I then got a domain, which I spent a lot of my idle time thinking of (along with funny business names and IG handles), but I got bored and got one with my name instead.

I followed a friend’s VPS tutorial for this, but took some liberties to his setup. After two days, I couldn’t get Coolify to work following his advice to turn off root SSH. Thinking whether to turn it on, I just bailed and installed Dokploy, which worked perfectly out of the box.

Obviously, I whipped this up with the Astro’s default blog template. The library is getting a lot of hype, and I get it. I have played with it in the last 3 months, and it really does make a lot of things simple. A lot of people are even transferring their database blogs to flat MD files for it.

One thing that I should’ve done sooner is making my own tailnet. Of course, I hooked the VPS up to Tailscale, but it turns out that it’s good idea to make one even without it. It’s awesome to run the dev server in the VPS, SSH through VS Code, and immediately be able to see the site change on your phone.