Why Django, Why?

One year ago, I was riding pretty high. Well, at least website wise. I'd successfully migrated my old Wordpress site from Bluehost to my Synology Diskstation. It was a little painful at first, but eventually I was able to successfully serve my own website from my own home.

There were some initial tradeoffs during that initial process of course. I wasn't able to peform a total rebuild in Django as I'd intended, due to the NAS being more configured for Wordpress hosting and any alterations to the serving configs could be wiped out by an update. So I settled for Wordpress for my own site, and was still able to install and use Python/Django for some side projects. Things were pretty great.

Then one morning, I was greeted in my office with the dreaded "System Crash" beeps. My volume had crashed, and I'd lost all my site data on the NAS. And I thought, "Aha, lesson learned: always backup your ish." Thankfully I had my Bluehost Wordpress backup, as well as some project stuff in git and was able to rebuild with minimal data loss. And I conigured a pretty thorough redundant backup system to prevent another such loss.

I did say *pretty* thorough, because of course it happened again. And I found I hadn't redundantly back-ed up everything. So my next lesson was, "Just because you can serve things on from a home NAS doesn't mean you should." It's simply not optimized for web hosting, installing packages was a pain, and I suppose there's no telling whether the crashes were just fate, or malicious. In any event, I swam for the open waters of Digital Ocean.

And it's been pretty good so far. Setting up a Django site was a breeze, and it sure feels nice to be free from the structures of Synology and bloat of Wordpress. Obviously it's a work in progress: the design so far is bare HTML and restoring and re-routing my old posts will be a bit of an adventure. But I'm looking forward to it!