This site first sprang to life around 4 years ago in the early days (ie first month) of my software career. I'd quickly realized that my mechanical engineering degree provided me zero preparation for the backend job I'd somehow managed to secure myself and I was frantically looking to achieve some level of usefulness. To fulfill this desire I began hunting for random work on Upwork and in parallel meandering through a course on AWS. It was midly ironic working through a course on infrastructure having never actually put anything on the internet so I thought creating a personal website would be a good exercise.
Seeing as my only experience writing software at the time was in a Ruby on Rails backend monolith I went with what I knew. The initial version of this site was a Rails project which served both the frontend and backend. In this case the backend was some basic models around posting, comments and such because I thought I'd be an avid article writer. Of course the whole system used docker compose just as we did at work because consistent distribution across machines is very important when building a personal site that will only ever be developed on your laptop and deployed to a single server.
I'm fuzzy on the rationale now, but I deployed the site with Heroku. This was likely due to the well written docs they have on deploying a Rails project. I actually found Heroku to be kind of annoying to deal with and in retrospect that makes complete sense because I needed none of the abstractions around availability or environment portability. I only saw how hard it was to debug why my stuff wasn't working.
Skip forward 4 years to this past fall where I remembered my old website and wanted to sit down and make some changes to it. I have certainly come a long way in my understanding of the internet and what the optimal solution for a problem is (and have a long ways still to go) so looking at that codebase made me physically cringe for what this project is. Realistically all this site will ever be is a place for me to write occasionally about topics that I find interesting. I don't even really feel a need to enable comments if people have thoughts they can simply email me. So I made the executive decision to rip the whole thing apart.
Nowadays this project is literally static html files hosted on an Ionos VPS that costs me exactly $2/month (compared to $7 at Heroku) (yes those 5 bucks matter). I've got a deploy script which scp's the files from my local onto the server using my local ssh key and that's about it. I don't even have a fancy markdown to html converter like I see many people write about, I'm just writing this in raw html on my computer.
For what this is my set up is perfect. It just took a little while to get here.