From Tumblr To Static Files

Addendum: To those looking to upload static files — or assets as they are called — on Tumblr, follow the link.

These last few weeks have been quite busy in spite of all appearances.

Recent Tumblr downtimes have forced me to consider another mean of posting my content on the Internet. I have long been fiddling with Jekyll, and so seemed the perfect replacement for Tumblr.

Along with the move of all my static files¹ to Amazon S3 — distributed through Amazon CloudFront —, I thought moving my whole website to static files would be a smart thing to do: everything is much snappier now.

Although it is now running fine and all, I have had quite a few issues server-wise: I initially wanted to move everything to CloudFront. Although it now supports Default Indexes, the inability to have a static IP made accessing CloudFront through the base name domain impossible.

I then moved everything to my brother’s web host. It worked fine — although not fast all around the world — until I finally found that my brother did not intend to use it² anymore. Once more in two weeks I had to look for a web host.

After much research, I finally found what seems unique in its field, NearlyFreeSpeech.net. It has the exact two upsides I wanted: Amazon’s pay-as-you-use pricing, and lighting fast static file server³. It also offers SSH access by default, and allows the use of rsync for file upload[^4].

I now have found my perfect setup, and it achieves very fast loading times quite anywhere in the world. A welcome improvement after Tumblr.