One of the things I’ve been putting off for years now is what the heck I was going to do with Freshbytes, the first domain I ever owned, and a place with a lot of inane ramblings from high school Benny. And for the past decade or so, that answer has been precisely nothing, besides putting it on the cheapest Australian shared hosting I could find and leaving it there, in the hopes that it would keep working.
And for most of past decade, that tactic has worked surprisingly well. Freshbytes started off on shared hosting at Bluehost, a cheap and cheerful option for a high school student that didn’t have much disposable income at the time. But eventually, and for reasons lost to time immemorial, maybe around the era where I moved away from the Bluehost and GoDaddy combo, it was moved onshore to the well-regarded Australian hosting provider VentraIP. Then moved again to Zuuver, VentraIP’s lower-cost subsidiary, and when Zuuver was eventually folded back into VentraIP, that’s where it has been for the past few years. Time is a flat circle, after all. But sometime in between all that, probably when the Zuuver to VentraIP migration happened, the DNS stopped pointing at whatever server it was being hosted on, and that meant going to Freshbytes stopped being served to the general public. After all, it’s always DNS. Or so the saying goes.
Which probably wasn’t a bad thing, given how it was running a positively ancient version of WordPress and there have been dozens of CVEs in that time. Probably. I haven’t actually looked, because I’m scared to. While the server it was being hosted on had been updated, WordPress itself hadn’t. Really the opposite of the issue that my own blog had, where WordPress had been updated, but the server hadn’t really as much. But the technical aspect was only one side of the story.
The other side of the coin was me wondering whether I wanted it back up in the first place in its original, early-2010 form. For probably just as long as it was down for, I wondered if it was better to keep something hosted at the domain, a “here-was Freshbytes, a domain name that Benny didn’t come up with, but was his first-ever domain nonetheless”-type story for someone stumbling across it, five, ten, fifteen years from now, instead of whatever inane ramblings and complete nonsense that was on there from that 2006-20210 era. I’m not saying there’s anything too incriminating on there, but there are probably certain takes which I wouldn’t share publicly today. I haven’t looked at those, either.
But whatever had happened, that’s all in the past now. I started by asking myself: if I wanted to keep Freshbytes working, with close to zero maintenance, for the next decade, what does that look like from a technical point of view? At that stage, WordPress wasn’t entirely out of the question; provided I could transition it to some kind of hosted WordPress platform or service, maybe that could work. At a cost, of course, but it could work.
It was when I was writing the post about this blog’s move to a new host that it dawned on me: what if I could turn it into a static site? Just plain HTML, CSS, and maybe JS, if required. We’d be removing all the interactivity from the site, but I thought that was a very reasonable trade-off for a site that was only ever going to be archived in a read-only fashion for the next decade. A quick chat with old mate Claude indicated that this was not only possible, but entirely plausible. There was even a WordPress plugin designed to handle the entire thing that would produce static HTML files for us. It likely wouldn’t be perfect, and there would likely be several additional steps that I would need to do afterwards to preserve some semblance of the original site, but it looked like an increasingly viable option.
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