Ever since I made this website, I hosted it on a VPS for a few bucks a month running lighttpd. It was fast and worked well, but the server itself was for another project which I have since then frozen for the time being. I noticed that quite a few people had their personal websites on github and using their hosting feature for exposing it over https. I decided to try it.

The first thing I had to decide is if this move is going to make any reader that stumbles accross here more suspect to tracking than previously. I am an avid opponent of any sort of online tracking, and as such this website does its absolute best to not do this. No cookies, no serverside logging, just free html pages. Would the move to github hinder this? Do they employ tracking?

Prior to moving, I hosted on OVH. I've been doing this for around ten years, and they where always good to me. I have no way of knowing if they track user access to any of their servers, but for the sake of this argument I have to assume they do. Github also has insights avaliable to me, but it does not resolve IP addresses or any data that may be used to track an individual. They can probably do that with their non public logs, but OVH could too, which means it comes down to which entity you like more.

I breifly considered running the site on my server at home, which is exposed to the internet for purposes of having access to my stuff over ssh. But this comes with its own downsides, namely privacy (it would always expose my public IP), and that my residential connection is not a high availability line.

So, after a bit of consideration I moved to github pages. One less server to maintain, since I am lazy like that. An added bonus is that my commits are now public, and whoever reads this can laugh at my HTML/CSS mistakes.