kfitz

Gitea

This site is running in 11ty and is built locally, after which the live site (which gets built into the _site folder) is pushed to my Reclaim Hosting account, where it's served up as kfitz.info. As an intermediate step, I have been pushing the code and content that builds the site to a GitHub repository, and then the _site folder to another GitHub repository, kfitz-site, mostly for preservation/backup purposes; if something happens to the server or to my local repo, there's another version-controlled pile of code out there from which things can be rebuilt. (Technically, I pull kfitz-site from GitHub to Reclaim. Similarly, presentations.kfitz.info, which runs in revealjs, is built locally, pushed to GitHub, and then pulled to Reclaim.)

I've had in my head for a while, though, that GitHub is in and of itself a point of failure, partially because of its ownership structure. On top of which, I haven't been delighted knowing that everything I push there is part of the greater Copilot feeding frenzy.

I'd been thinking for a while about migrating my repos to Codeberg, a community-governed alternative that -- a key consideration at this hour of the world -- is not hosted in the US. But it turns out that the terms of service on Codeberg highly discourage private repositories, and both kfitz.info and kfitz-site are private, even though the eventual published site is obviously very public and CC BY 4.0 licensed. I've kept those repositories private because they're not the product I'm trying to share -- the website is -- and I want a little freedom to make mistakes without everything being quite that out there. I totally get why Codeberg's TOS is structured the way it is; they're really focused on building open-source communities around FLOSS development, which is a huge part of why I wanted to support them. It's just not the work I'm doing.

So I spent a chunk of yesterday exploring the possibility of self-hosting GitLab, but holy cats is it resource-intensive. The instance I spun up on a Digital Ocean droplet would have cost me $32/month to keep in operation, and even so it was pegging 100% memory usage, with just one user. So... no, not unless I were really hosting the service for a bunch of friends who wanted to kick in a little.

This morning, though, I spun up a Gitea instance on a much smaller Digital Ocean droplet, which will run $14/month. It's super zippy and very lightweight, and has allowed me to migrate my repositories from GitHub quite seamlessly. And there's lots of room to grow, resource-wise, so if those friends decide they want to test things out I can invite them to join me.

The next thing I want to investigate in whether I can run that Gitea instance on a shared server, using one droplet to host multiple applications and sites...

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