Since I wanted to develop this website all by myself and in .NET, this meant there were going to be a few restrictions when it came to the hosting side of this. After encountering these restrictions I decided it was time to search for a different hosting solution.

There are several providers that allow you to host an ASP.NET website. This means however, that you're dependent on the way they configure their webservers and which services they provide. The application may run on a shared application pool and use a shared IP address, you may not always be able to configure the DNS the way you want, you may not be able to configure the webserver the way you want, you only get a single free Let's Encrypt certificate, etcetera. As a developer you will quickly encounter these blockades because you simply do not have full control over your website. Finally I also encountered frequent downtime with several of these hosting providers.

To gain full freedom I decided to switch to a Virtual Private Server (VPS) that would run on Ubuntu. This meant I had to port the website to .NET Core which was a nice challenge.

Eventually I did not choose .NET Core but it's successor: .NET 5.0. Porting was relatively easy to do. I already had some experience with .NET Core at work which helped me a lot. It also have me the chance to address some frustrations I had with several packages and make other improvements on the backend. In the end I also gained a lot of new experience with the new .NET.

After porting was complete it was time to look for a good VPS. I eventually decided to go for Hetzner after reading some good reviews and finding out their prices are more than reasonable. I configured a new Ubuntu machine and installed .NET en nginx. Again, my experience from work was a big help here but now I had the time to dig a little deeper and learn a lot more. For instance, I managed to configure the webserver and website to have the security settings in order as much as possible, so that SecurityHeaders.com, SSL Labs and Internet.nl will now give the website the highest score possible. Not really necessary, but it was a lot of fun to get it right and I learned a lot from it.

I've also switched domainnames for this website in the past years but I finally decided to just go for wesleydonker.com. It's simple, clear and a nice .com domain. I've also decided to no longer use the same hosting provider as the website for managing DNS settings. So instead I move the DNS management to Cloudflare.

So I'm more than satisfied now. I ended up with a nice little project, managed to get the website to run very stable and I ended up paying a lot less as well.

I'm happy! 😃