The joys of dealing with web hosting

Last night for some reason the web browser on my phone tried to load up my personal profile page of my website. Not sure why, maybe I had it as an open tab from a few days ago? That was not the issue though, what was is that it brought to my attention that it wasn't working. 

This page is set up as a subdomain of my main blog as it is actually hosted on GitHub. Sure, I could set up another page on my blog (like I have done with my "about me" page), but I wanted to create a dedicated page using HTML and a bit of CSS that is straight to the point and can be viewed in isolation; even though the theming is an almost exact match to my blog. 

My blog was working fine, so it was either GitHub or something to do with my domain provider. At this point it was almost midnight and my laptop was off. I had an app for my domain provider on my phone which enabled me to take a quick look at what might be going on. I couldn't immediately notice anything and as I was pretty tired I didn't want to mess around with SSL certificates until the morning. I also had a quick check at GitHub using its app. Now, the GitHub app is fine, but messing around with projects on there is not something you really want to do on a ~6 inch screen. My better judgement continues to prevail so I left everything, set myself a reminder for the morning, and went to sleep.

After having a coffee Huel as a double whammy breakfast and wake up jolt I booted up my now aging laptop (a new one is gradually making its way to me, Lenovo picked the slowest delivery option and the shipper is giving my order a grand tour). I decided to start with refreshing the SSL certificate I have for my main domain which also extends to my subdomain. This didn't make any immediate difference. However, I soon found the DNS settings in GitHub (if you haven't used it in a while it's not immediately obvious) and it was already saying that it was in part 2 of 3 of checking the new SSL certificate. This sounded very promising. Gave it the few more minutes it suggested, and voila working subdomain with no security errors.

This might sound like an overdrawn solution to a simple problem, but most people (and I'm pretty confident in that statement) do not know the first thing about web hosting. They are happy to create an account somewhere and all the hard work is done for them. For the most part, there is nothing wrong with that, but I do think more people - those who are at least interested in web technology - should give it a go.

The setup for my domain and wider web presence is a little bit convoluted, but it works for me and I enjoy troubleshooting. 

This blog admittedly is just the default free version, but for now it is one thing I don't have to worry about the behind the scenes aspects of it.