Moving off Wordpress and on to Netlify

Preface

This post has been a long time coming. I started writing this Thursday, August 26. It's now September.

Why?

I started down the path of converting my Wordpress site to a static site because I started getting (or at least started getting notified of) "hackers" scanning my site for Wordpress vulnerabilities. I installed a plugin called Wordfence, which I have to say, is an awesome app for being free. It could block IPs that were hitting the site and you could configure it with how many hits before blocking or if they hit a specific URL known for a vulnerability. I don't know if there was an upgrade but I started seeing my site getting hit and I wanted to jump on the static site generator bandwagon before it was, you know, gone.

Requirements

Email aliases

I use my email aliases a lot. I have almost 500 aliases. By creating email aliases I can further increase my personal security by using a different email and password on websites. I can see when a website a) sold my email or b) was compromised and discard any emails addressed to that address.

Searching

Email Hosting

I've been using Hostgator for 10 years now and have been pretty happy with it. I was only planning on switching if I found another way to host that was cheaper and I still had unlimited email aliases.

I looked at GoDaddy's email solution and Google's Workspace (formally G Suite) but neither had unlimited aliases. So I decided to stick with HostGator for email.

Website Hosting

AWS

When I started looking at alternate hosting solutions. I looked at AWS first but I think you have to have a Route 53 route set up if you want to use your own domain name. And the cost of that was more than what I am paying now.

Netlify

I've "kicked the tires" before and they wow'd me with ThanosJS . Ok, not really with the the ThanosJS, but with the tool used to deploy it: Netlify Drop .

When I tested the deploy this time it went smoothly so, that's where I'm at now.

Steps

Separating the email and site servers

I first had to split my current site that served as my email server and my webserver. I did some research into domain name records.

DNS resources
1. DNS records definitions
2. HostGator article which has been deprecated since I last saw it and took the time to comment and report that it was outdated. 🤔
3. How to Configure Email on a Different Host from the Website It wasn't up-to-date either, but provided clues to get me there
4. Configure external DNS for a custom domain

DNS Steps

Mail Server Settings

I basically had to set up an existing subdomain to instead point to an IP address and not to my root domain. What was not documented was what to do if that subdomain already exists. I have cPanel and it wasn't letting me set the email configuration on the existing domain. I tried creating a new mail subdomain but that didn't seem right with ....

Web Server Settings

Netlify does most of the work. Follow the directions here. The only "gotcha" was I originally had "www.adamkoch.com" as the A record instead of "adamkoch.com". Not a big deal and easy to rectify.

Results

Since I really enjoy learning this has been awesome.

Conclusion

If you have a chance to learn something new, then do it!