What is it?

Astro is a static site generator(SST). It takes some content and can produce static HTML documents.

Why migrate?

Next.js is a powerful tool, too powerful I would say. In my experience, it is not ideal for static websites or other simple stuff. I have seen a lot of great personal websites and blogs made with Astro, so I decided to give it a go. Found a great theme called Astro Nano. Configured it as I wanted and added my own posts. It worked out great at the end. I love the result.

Hosting and CI/CD

On one of the cold, windy day of Astana, I received an email saying that I should host this website in Kazakhstan. This website was made with Next.js, so it was easier to just host it on Vercel meaning server was in US. I could just host my website on my own homelab server, but it is no longer feasible due to Cloudflare IPs being blocked in Kazakhstan. I had to find some hosting solution in Kazakhstan.

Most obvious and easy was would be VPS, but I did not want to waste a lot of money on it. Nowadays, on small plans you spend more on IPv4 address than machine itself. Searching through web and recommendation from a friend brought me to ps.kz(also registrar of my domain). Apparently, they provide 384tg/month plan to host a website. They support bunch of stuff, but I only needed an static file serving and some support for CI.

They do not provide CI, since my website is run with Plesk. However, I could use git function to clone repo with webhooks each time there is a new commit on main branch. This is not usable with Astro, since I have to generate HTML documents from markdown. Thinking back and forth I came to conclusion to just use FTP functionality of Plesk. I found a Github Action suitable for this purpose and wrote a simple CI/CD workflow.

name: build and deploy

on:
  push:
    branches: [ "main" ]
  pull_request:
    branches: [ "main" ]

jobs:
  deploy:
    name: deploy
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    permissions:
      contents: read 
    steps:
    - name: checkout
      uses: actions/checkout@v4

    - uses: pnpm/action-setup@v4
      with:
        version: 10

    - name: setup node
      uses: actions/setup-node@v4
      with:
        node-version: 22
        cache: 'pnpm'
    
    - name: install deps
      run: pnpm i
    
    - name: lint
      run: pnpm lint
    
    - name: build
      run: pnpm build

    - name: sync
      uses: SamKirkland/FTP-Deploy-Action@v4.3.5
      with:
        server: ${{ secrets.FTP_SERVER}}
        username: ${{ secrets.FTP_USERNAME}}
        password: ${{ secrets.FTP_PASSWORD }}
        local-dir: ./dist/
        server-dir: ./httpdocs/

It works flawlessly. I am happy that I could find a easy and cost-effective solution to personal website hosting problem.

You can find previous Next.js version of this website on separate branch if you want.