Setting up Hosting

I've finally bit the bullet and paid for some hosting for this blog. I've gone with IONOS because they offer everything I need and as I don't want any fancy features their poor support reputation does not really bother me. (...yet? :S)

Their site really is confusing though! After eventually figuring out that I can't have a VPS and separate email hosting, I decided to go for web hosting which includes a couple of email addresses.

At some point I think I want to try out hosting a Lemmy instance which will require a VPS, but for now I think web hosting will suffice.

Figuring out how to actually find and set up my site was also a real chore. The provider's web interface kept guiding me towards Wordpress and their own site builder. A bunch of other options seemed to be asking me to order more products when I had already ordered everything I wanted.

Eventually I found that I could acces my site under the 'Hosting' section rather than the 'Web sites' section.

...because of course that's where access to my web site would be.

At the time of writing it has taken me a few hours to figure all this out and get a static http site working (publishing via rsync over ssh).

My SSL certificate is still 'Waiting for approval', which is slightly annoying as 'DNS-based domain validation' should take seconds at most. Maybe this will prove to be my first interaction with the famed IONOS support...