Personal website overhaul late January 2021

Categories Professional, Website

As of late January of 2021, I have made the decision with a couple of my fellow NEIT alumni to switch our hosting provider to Ionos for our personal websites. One of my friends was already using Ionos as his hosting provider for the many websites that he hosts and has had a great experience in using it. Influenced by my friend’s decision, I have decided to switch from a basic web hosting provider with CPanel support to a dedicated VMS from Ionos, which I have direct control over the server (control as far as being able to access my entire server with root permissions via SSH and FTP, allowing me to further control Apache web server settings directly).

In addition to switching my hosting provider, I had also switched my domain name registrar from GoDaddy (I started with them with $12 for my domain all the way to around $35 for my domain, way too expensive!) to NameCheap (I paid $8 for my domain with them), again influenced my friend who was already using NameCheap. This change was made back in August, but at that time, I had put my site into Coming Soon mode for a while until I was able to find a purpose for the site.

After making the switch to IONOS, I had spent a week or so determining my next steps for the website. But first, I had to fix the kinks that were of a result of my switchover from the old hosting provider to Ionos, such as adding the new certificate from Ionos to the webpage to allow HTTPS access to further encrypt traffic to my site, allowing permalinks to work, and making some additional changes to further harden and secure the web server.

Having the new website put in place, I have decided to reintroduce my new website to the Internet. I have kept the same design that I had and made a couple of minor tweaks to a few of my pages, such as removing some sections on the home page and adding my latest employment experience to my Resume. At this time, since I do not have an email server set up on this webserver yet, which will be a future project of mine, I have decided to take down the contact form. Until I can reintroduce the new contact form, you can contact me directly at braeden.santos@outlook.com.

I am proud to bring this website back to you, and with this new server, I will be able to introduce more websites for any additional personal projects and other things I decide to need web services for using this same web server. All I need to do is either create a subdomain or buy a new domain and tie it to this server, as well as make some modifications on the Apache side to allow access to the new domain/subdomain. Along the way, I will make some modifications to this site once the time comes, or introduce more sites within this web server once the time comes.