Let's Encrypt

When my SSL cert MaxCDN was expiring on my personal site I decided it was a good time to revamp some things. Since GitHub Services is depreciated I can no longer have #CDN cache purges automated among other things. So I decided on the following: GitHub Pages, Netlify, Let's Encrypt and Jekyll. Staying the same was Bootstrap, jQuery, Grunt & #GoogleFonts.

What's awesome about GitHub Pages is that it has a @{#CDN}|topic:null| (Fastly) built-in and anytime you push to master, it purges the cache instantaneously without you have to do anything special. Netlify is magic, I highly recommend it to anyone using #StaticSiteGenerators.

For the most part, everything went smoothly. The only things I had issues with were the following:

• If you want to point www to @{GitHub Pages}|tool:683| you need to rename the repo to www
• If you edit something in the _config.yml you need to restart bundle exec jekyll s or changes won't show
• I had to disable the @{Grunt}|tool:845| htmlmin module. I replaced it with Jekyll layout that compresses HTML for @{#webperf}|topic:1131|

Last but certainly not least, I made a donation to Let's Encrypt. If you use their service consider doing it too: https://letsencrypt.org/donate/

#CDG

I use Laravel because it's the most advances PHP framework out there, easy to maintain, easy to upgrade and most of all : easy to get a handle on, and to follow every new technology ! PhpStorm is our main software to code, as of simplicity and full range of tools for a modern application.

Google Analytics Analytics of course for a tailored analytics, Bulma as an innovative CSS framework, coupled with our Sass (Scss) pre-processor.

As of more basic stuff, we use HTML5, JavaScript (but with Vue.js too) and Webpack to handle the generation of all this.

To deploy, we set up Buddy to easily send the updates on our NGINX / Ubuntu server, where it will connect to our GitHub Git private repository, pull and do all the operations needed with Deployer .

CloudFlare ensure the rapidity of distribution of our content, and Let's Encrypt the https certificate that is more than necessary when we'll want to sell some products with our Stripe api calls.

Asana is here to let us list all the functionalities, possibilities and ideas we want to implement.

Hosting updown.io started with a single OVH server and quickly grew to more server, first it was DigitalOcean VMs and we were very satisfied about them. But we then noticed some shortcomings about #IPv6 networking, although DigitalOcean supports it they don't provide the standard IP range to each VM (by choice) and thus have to block port 25 to avoid other machines being blocked in case of spammer. This is not good for us it means we can't monitor IPv6 SMTP servers properly, that's why we switched to @Vultr (one of their main competitors) which provides similar prices, more locations, and true IPv6 support with no blocked ports. Of course they offer less tools and the support is probably better at DigitalOcean but so far we're happy with @Vultr.

We still use some @OVH servers (which offers tremendous price/performance ratio) for the main web and database server + 2 of the daemons. In addition to this, we also have 2 DigitalOcean VMs for the secondary web and database server and for the automatic TLS termination proxy used to automatically issue Let's Encrypt certs for status page custom domains (for these servers the IPv6 port block is not an issue)

We use Let's Encrypt to easily set up TLS certificates on our servers - for free and completely automated. Let's Encrypt

The first certs we got issued were EV SSL certificates from Comodo, but we later decided that we do not want to support the whole CA-thing anymore as they constantly get abused and take tremendous amounts of cash in exchange, so we work with Let's Encrypt since 2016.