↰ This site, 4c65.dev

Vague Ideas

 Conception of this project started at about the midpoint of 2025 when I was casually browsing server hosts in my downtime. I had previously considered creating a public website for some reason or another, but my distractible nature and weird schedule kept me from taking it any further than an idea.

 However, at this time I happened to have fewer ongoing projects and a bit more cash for spending. And so my silly idea began to take shape. I would build a project blog so I could journal about the things I'd built and learn about web tech as I go!

 I had made several web-apps and dashboards for work and already had a decent grasp of certain technologies like Apache2, Vue.js, Python-Flask, PostgreSQL, and assorted JavaScript libraries. So... I resolved to not use any of it! The secondary purpose was to learn new stuff in a non-work or school environment.

 As the idea took shape, more and more ideas came to me about what I might do with a domain of my own. I will explain the feature creep of this project later.

DNS and Hosting

 The idea being solidified, I moved on to planning. The first order of business was to find a domain and registrar. The name of the site had already been planned before I even took the idea seriously. 4c65 is the hexadecimal code for the first two letters of my first name.

 The place I worked at had previously used Namecheap, but I found their pricing confusing. Almost intentionally confusing. After some searching, I discovered that a domain could be registered under Cloudflare for very basic and un-complicated prices.

 As for the hosting: I found countless companies touting their easy blog hosting services, but that's not what I needed. I wanted a bare-bones Linux server so I could build up my own site and assorted services using tools I was not familiar with. Several VPS hosts were found and discarded. Among them were Linode, AWS, and Hostinger. Eventually, I settled on IONOS's cheapest plan. Then... I made the purchases. And here we are.

Plans

 Once the site is built out and I'm happy with how it looks, I'll take it to v2. Where v1 is a static site with entirely hand-typed content that is updated via git, v2 will be a dynamically generated website with all relevant content stored in a database.  Yeah... something more modern would be awesome. It's hard enough writing a blog post, I've found, without having to write the HTML around it!