Finally got my website back up this weekend! I am now using a very minimal (non-database) CMS called Grav. It is not user-friendly at first, but once you read the documentation, it is easy to understand. I don't like it, honestly, because despite its simplicity, it is both very easy to mess up things and very difficult to do specific things at the same time. Almost to the point where I want something so minimal, I might as well be handcoding the HTML/CSS (or, at least, just simply "compiling" the output, stripping out what I don't want, and just serving the static files. In the end, this gives me a nice interface for entering posts, at least.
I have been using RamNode for a very minimal VPS for a few years now; they seem to be a reliable service provider (read: they regularly pay their Data Center subleases). I'm paying US$15.00/year for their "128MB SVZ" plan (OpenVZ SSD VPS), which is signifcantly less than I'd be paying for actual internet and electricity/cooling for a home server (I am not even going to bother to back that up with numbers here).:
- 128MB RAM
- 1 CPU Core Access
- 12GB SSD Space
- 1Gbps Port, 500GB Bandwidth
- 1 IPv4 Address, /64 IPv6, TUN/TAP
HOWEVER, I wasted several days of trial and error trying to get a normal SQL/etc-database-based CMS to work, and I could just never get the database aspect to work properly in Ubuntu OR Debian. I went through that cycle three times in the past year and still never got it working, so now I am here with Grav. :)