Setting up this site

This is the first post on the new site. Quick notes on what’s running under the hood.

Stack

• Domain: tomeageer.com, registered at Porkbun
• Site: Astro static, plain CSS, no JavaScript framework on top
• Hosting: A small CentOS Stream 9 VPS, behind nginx
• TLS: Let’s Encrypt via certbot, auto-renewing
• Deploy: pnpm build && rsync -avz --delete dist/ vps:/var/www/tomeageer.com/

That’s it. No database, no API, no Node process running on the server. Just files.

Why Astro instead of Next.js

For a personal site that’s mostly static content, Next.js is overkill — it pulls in a full React server runtime when all I want is “render Markdown to HTML”. Astro renders everything to plain HTML at build time. The browser downloads zero JavaScript unless I explicitly opt in for an interactive component.

The end-to-end build → deploy takes under 10 seconds.

Why a 1.7G VPS works

Because the server runs only nginx for this site. There’s no Node process eating RAM, no JVM warming up, no database to maintain. nginx serving static HTML is one of the cheapest things you can ask a Linux box to do — measured in single-digit MB of RAM at idle.

If I ever need a real backend (forms, dynamic data, auth), I’ll add a Node service on a separate port and reverse-proxy to it. For now, the simplest possible stack wins.

What’s next

• Real content for /about/ and /projects/
• More writing here as I figure things out
• Maybe a /now/ page
• An RSS feed once there are enough posts to subscribe to