The technology behind this website in 2024
I’ve been running this blog for almost four years now. During that time, everything has fundamentally changed twice on the technical side, so it’s time to take a look at the current tech stack.
This blog initially went online in December 2020. After running a blog from a plain HTML site between 2016 and 2019, I decided in 2020, as part of redesigning my homepage, to rebuild my blog as well — this time using the very well-known open-source blogging CMS Wordpress. Even though this blog still looks very similar to how it did in 2020, a lot has changed behind the scenes since then. From a small home server to a virtualized mini server and then to a bare-metal root server, the technical foundation has changed no fewer than three times, so it’s high time to take a look at the site’s technical underpinnings.
A quick look back: in 2020, this site was deployed on my home server in Heidelberg with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS using the LAMP/LNMP stack (Linux, Nginx, MariaDB, PHP) — a very classic setup, with the website being served directly by Nginx, without any intermediate layers or virtualization.
In 2021, drawing on the experience I gained from founding my IT services startup, I switched to a virtualized LNMP stack with Docker on a small V-Server from Netcup. I did this mainly because my private internet connection had a regularly changing IP address, which I constantly had to keep up to date with DynV6. There is a Linux daemon for this use case, but it doesn’t really make you happy in the long run, especially since a Vodafone connection is also far from 100% uptime.
So I moved everything to Netcup — same old stack, but now with a truly static IP and, for the first time, Cloudflare as a caching layer and CDN in front of the website. This became especially helpful when, briefly around my appearance on the MDR series "Einfach Genial!", the website almost buckled under several thousand identical requests. A small dual-core V-Server is simply not built for that.
As the company grew, there were more and more websites to manage, and I was also able to gain experience with other systems for website administration. So in mid-2023, I carried out the next migration of the website (and hopefully the last one for the time being). That brings us to the current stack of this blog:
- Netcup RS9.5 2000 root server with 320 gigabytes of HDD storage and unlimited outbound traffic;
- Ubuntu 24.04 LTS with Ubuntu Pro
- Plesk Obsidian Web Host Edition (which results in a LAMP stack)
- Wordpress with Elementor
- CDN, minification, and bot purging via Cloudflare
But am I satisfied with the tech stack now? Basically yes, but today I would take a different path for a blog like this: with the Ghost CMS, there is now a very powerful and much more search-engine-optimized content management system for blogs, with which I’ve had good experiences in projects such as goldschmidtphoto.com and festivalreview.de.
