Ross Thomson - Website Launched 🚀

Website Launched 🚀

Published on 18 Oct 2019

Well I guess if you’re reading this article, you already know this site has been launched huh? It’s been a project years in the making and took several tries and re-starts before I finally took a step back and settled on one main criteria - cost.

My portfolio site originally started out as a Craft CMS build hosted on a linux server but I never really got round to finishing it (due to one reason or another). I was therefore paying for hosting services and licenses that I was never fully utilising, which in retrospect seems like a waste of my hard earned cash. So I went back to the drawing board and started again, but this time I was doing it on the cheap!

With cost being the main criteria I knew I’d have to compromise on several key features of a “normal” website such as storage, performance, as well as a few other things. But in order to help get the ball rolling I asked myself the following question - “A portfolio website needs to showcase a number of different things, but what doesn't it need to be?”:

  • It doesn’t need to be fancy - showcase my work/experience/portfolio. Keep it simple
  • It doesn’t need to be super dynamic - how often will the site update anyway? 🤷‍♂️
  • It shouldn’t be expensive - no point in paying for services I don’t need

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a solution I’d recommend to most of my clients (or anyone who isn’t a developer for that matter) but I run this site for around $35 (£27) per year. That’s only £2.25 a month! Which is surely to be within most peoples hosting budget right? This cost is purely down to the yearly cost for my domain (rossthomson.dev). There’s no hosting fees. No license fees. It’s all open source, and it’s all free.

Two benefits of this website build I feel I should mention is that because of its simplicity, it performs very quickly and is also pretty secure because a static website like this doesn’t have a database that can be maliciously manipulated. Here’s the stack used:

I’ll put together a multi-part tutorial on how I implemented this site in the near future for any other web developers out there who want a flat file CMS website on the cheap - so watch this space.

Feel free to have a look around to find out a little bit more about me and take a look at some of my latest projects.