I’ve been moving a lot of my web content off of a personal server which has been kept in to my apartment to various hosting services while on break this year. Sites like Ask An Asian Person and other small inside jokes I used to host on a Windows 2003 Server with IIS on a Dell machine that ran in my closet. That setup is/was so very, well, 2003. In addition, it’s always a good move to reduce and remove any ingress points to my home network.
So for a bunch of the silly small sites I have, I’ve moved them over to one-dyno free hosting on Heroku. To do that, I made up a little template to use called static-heroku-node. It’s a tiny 10 line Node.js + Express application that deploys applications out of the /public/ folder in the app. Quick and easy to use, I managed to move a few sites over in short order.
As an aside, I moved my blog over to DreamHost. I looked at Heroku for hosting WordPress — there are a bunch of options on how to do it, but any production setup (e.g. > 1 dyno and any of their production level Postgres databases) would cost something like $25-$50 per month which is a bit rich for just a blog. DreamHost’s 1-click WordPress setup is much cheaper and more flexible than trying to scaffold the same thing up on Heroku/Dotcloud/etc.