I started my website in the 1990’s, I still have some of the old pages around. I started my blog around a decade ago. Over the years I have been on a number of platforms.

Year Host Technology Blog
1996 GConnect
(Local ISP)		 Static HTML, ASP (Classic), FrontPage None
2007 WebStrike
EasyCGI		 Static HTML, ASP.NET, PHP WordPress
2012 GoDaddy Static HTML, ASP.NET MVC, BlogEngine.NET
2017 Github
Azure		 Static HTML, ASP.NET Core Github Pages, Jekyll

Moving platform is never straightforward. However the reason for moving each time has been different.

2007

This move was motivated by opportunity. There was nothing wrong with my ISP it was simply that they did not offer ASP.NET. I didn’t really need ASP.NET but the cost wasn’t great and it gave me an opportunity to experiment with my own projects such as worldolio. Also I got the chance to run WordPress and start a blog, I wasn’t sure that I would actually blog but I though I would give it a go.

2012

This move was motivated by functionality. EasyCGI could or would not upgrade to .NET v4. I was desperate to move away from WordPress and wanted to move to BlogEngine.NET, this required .NET v4 so I moved again.

2017

This move was motivated by cost. GoDaddy have been great hosts, the servers are fast, and relatively problem free. There have been a few issues, individually they are not much but together they have become annoying.

  1. It costs.
    Its around 100 USD a year, its not much but I have no revenue stream for this site so its just a cost
  2. Running in medium trust.
    It is a shared server so everyone runs in medium trust. This means I cannot use SQLite instead I am forced into using SQLServer CE and pre-compiled NHibernate proxies. Again the problem has been solved and it does work but I never liked the solution.
  3. BlogEngine.
    I never kept BlogEngine up to date so I never got the benefit of new updates. To be honest I have about 10 comments that were not generated by a spam bot and about 10,000 that were so I wasn’t really making much use of the dynamic nature of BlogEngine.NET. It also never exactly became mainstream and I was become nervous of getting my data trapped in an obsolete system.

Brave New World

I decided to move to a combination of Github and Azure. The attractions of each are

Github Pages for Static pages and Blog

  1. Free
  2. Data easy to extract and move.
    Its not dynamic, its generated from markdown which should make it easier to get any data out even if I need to extract it as static HTML.
  3. Mainstream
    Jekyll is already more mainstream than BlogEngine ever was so I am pretty confident I would be able to find a new host if needed.
  4. Natural
    At last no more rubbish web based editors, or using an ageing LiveWriter to upload posts, I can use Visual Studio Code and Git, this is an environment I use every day.
  5. Fast
    Using Github to deliver static HTML is very fast.

Azure for dynamic content (books catalog and worldolio)

  1. Free
    I am surprised that AWS has no free tier. It didn’t when I was looking, and Azure does so it gets the nod.
  2. Mainstream
    Once again loads of documentation on how to get anything working in Azure, from old ASP.NET sites to new .NET Core and Node.js
  3. Able to use SQLite
    Which I always preferred to SQLServerCE