This website
- statically generated by Hugo; using the Even theme
- code is hosted on a private repository at Github
- hosted by AWS S3 and CloudFront CDN
- GoatCounter for tracking post count instead of Google Analytics
- DNS by AWS Route 53
- videos and images delivered with the Bunny.net CDN
- written in VSCodium(VSCode fork)
Cost of running the site
How much does it cost to keep this website available monthly
| Service | Description | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Hugo | Site generator | - |
| AWS | Hosting | €2 |
| Cloudbear | Domain registration & DNS | €0.38 |
| GoatCounter | Privacy-focused web analytics | - |
| updown.io | Status monitoring service | €0.12 |
| Total :cash: | €2.5 |
Hosting
The blog is served from an Amazon S3 bucket, fronted by the CloudFront CDN to increase performance. The only time the bucket is written to is when I update the site: none of your data is stored on Amazon’s servers. Of course, in order for your browser to see a page, it has to ask Amazon for it and send some basic information about what it wants and what kind of system you have, but I have web logging disabled, so in theory that information should go away once the request is over. But I am unable to vouch for what Amazon does with it.
Why AWS?
As much as I don’t like to give Jeff Bezos more money, they offer compenents which work together and circumvent some technical limitations relating to CNAME flattening at root level of a domain in combination with a CDN.
Monitoring
The monitoring service report is available at status.thomasbrinkman.nl for anyone that is interessted in reliability and performance metrics of CloudFront CDN. The site is being monitored on HTTP level, the requests are performed at dual-stack(IPv4/v6). Fun observation, when the monitoring started you can see that the repsonse time is longer because the files are not available at the closest CDN Edge server of the bot and the files needs to be retrieved from the S3 bucket which is located in Europe. After a period of time the response times decreases because all the files are cached at the edge server.
Privacy
Analytics
TL;DR: I use a privacy-focused web analytics service that respects your privacy to gather statistics on how populair various pages are and how people get to the site. Neither I nor any advertisers can track the activity of individual users via this service, even anonymously. You can opt out should you not even want to share aggregate data.
GoatCounter uses JavaScript for the tracking tag. Because of this, you can use uBlock Origin, NoScript, or Ghostery to block JavaScript on my site (this might make some pages display/behave in unintended ways).
GoatCounter is set to respect the browsers Do Not Track header.
Cookies
No cookies are used.
GDPR, CCPA, etc.
This blog is not a business, so I do not legally need to comply with any of the cunsumer data protection regulations in the first place. However at this site does not collect any per
Ads
I promise to keep your browsing experience free from ads.
More information
If there’s anything else you’d like to know about how I use your information or the security of this site, please contact me.
– Thomas