Elena Rossini on GoToSocial ⁂<p>🏕️ my adventures in <a href="https://aseachange.com/tags/selfhosting" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>selfhosting</span></a> - day 97 (tiramisu edition) 🍮<br><br>Good morning Fedi friends!<br><br>If you read my toots this weekend, you may be familiar with the onslaught of issues I faced with my self-hosted Ghost blog.<br><br>The short version is: as soon as I unveiled its URL, I started to edit old toots in Mastodon - updating articles with the new address of my blog. Problem was: those toots were quite popular, with over 150 shares and hundreds of likes. I experienced the "Mastodon Hug of Death" AKA dozens of independent servers trying to fetch the blog preview image... which immediately overwhelmed my VPS and made it go offline. So my new visitors were very confused and immediately reported that the URL of my new blog didn't work. All this because I had failed to set up a cache / reverse proxy. Aw the things you learn!<br><br>I was feeling pretty dejected on Saturday about this whole ordeal but when I woke up on Sunday (see previous toot in this chain) I recaptured my fighting spirit. I thought: I put so much work into this blog - like, really - I cannot possibly give up now. So I resolved to add a CDN to it to help with incoming requests / traffic.<br><br>This was yesterday - aka Sunday - aka a day I'm supposed to spend offline with my husband and child. Every time they went off to play a game, I had 10 precious minutes to try something. And friends, my attempts got squashed all over again in the worst possible way.<br><br>I tried BunnyCDN first. Very easy and fast to set up, even if the onboarding is missing key information. My site was cached by them super quickly but then I had to delete ALL my DNS records otherwise I couldn't add a CNAME config to it - it was conflicting with all my DNS records for the subdomain.<br><br>Fine! I did that even if it meant deleting TXT records linked to the Mailgun newsletter. "I'll deal with that later" I thought. (And yes, deleting them was necessary otherwise the DNS panel wouldn't allow me to add a CNAME).<br><br>With the CNAME added I kept getting a 508 loop error, I reached out to support, they answered super quickly but didn't give me instructions about how to do things correctly. It was all very confusing, assuming I was an advanced sysadmin. So after 3 emails with them I gave up. I deleted the setup, went back and re-created my DNS records but then the SSL certificate was broken. Ouf. I thought: certainly I just have to wait for DNS records to propagate. And that was the case this morning (HUGE sigh of relief).<br><br>Then I tried Cloudflare (yikes, didn't want to) just to see if the setup was easier and saw right off the bat that I couldn't add a subdomain... they require a top level domain even though my TLD is linked to a self-hosted Wordpress site on my hosting provider, whereas the subdomain is linked to a VPS with a totally different IP address.<br><br>My self-hosting confidence has taken the worst beating EVER but I'm 3 days away from celebrating 100 days of self-hosting. So I will try one last resort: editing NGINX records to set up caching that way. And/or reverse proxy, I'm not really sure what this all means but I will try. <span class="h-card"><a href="https://social.vivaldi.net/@fhekland" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@<span>fhekland</span></a></span> sent me this great link: <a href="https://scotthelme.co.uk/caching-ghost-with-nginx/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://scotthelme.co.uk/caching-ghost-with-nginx/</a><br><br>I just need to step away from this for a day or two because this whole ordeal was a major letdown. I called this update the "tiramisu" edition because in Italian tiramisu means "pull me up" / "cheer me up."<br><br>Silver lining: I now have a life hack for handling situations like these. I need to keep a to do list with simple techie tasks I can solve... to restore a sense of accomplishment during challenging times. Like: everything may be bad, but at least I did ___.<br><br>THANK YOU for the dozens of messages you sent me this weekend, sorry I was mostly offline with my family and will try to reply to each one of you now.<br><br>Wishing you a great week!<br><br><a href="https://aseachange.com/tags/mysocalledsudolife" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>MySoCalledSudoLife</span></a></p>