After five years with Netsons.org for hosting and domain registration (a genuinely pleasant experience, and very affordable by Italian hosting standards), I decided it was time to take full control of the stack.
I moved the domain registration to Namecheap and started self-hosting on a DigitalOcean VPS.
The new stack Link to heading
The fun part of self-hosting is that you get to choose every piece of the puzzle. Here’s what I settled on:
- nginx with TLS and HTTP/2 enabled; after years on Apache,
- PHP 7 via php7.0-fpm: a significant performance improvement over PHP 5
- MySQL: no changes there
- TLS everywhere via Let’s Encrypt: free, automated, and trusted by all major browsers
If you’re reading this, the migration worked: nginx is serving you the encrypted version of this site, and the Let’s Encrypt certificate chain is valid.
Updated 2026: This site has since moved through several more infrastructure iterations. It ran on a self-hosted Kubernetes cluster with a full GitOps pipeline for a while, and now runs on Hugo deployed to Cloudflare Pages, no VPS needed. The full migration story is in From WordPress to Hugo and Cloudflare Pages.