Here we are in a whole new world and a whole new webhost. This website has moved from Neocities to being hosted on a little Raspberry Pi Zero W wedged behind my couch. And let me tell you, getting the website working on that Pi was way more of an adventure than it needed to be. That's right, folks, it's story time again! Let me tell you one about the website that almost got away.
So, let's start at the beginning, with what I intended to do. My original plan was actually to host my site on a Raspberry Pi Pico 2W, which as some of you might know is an even smaller microcontroller board. It can be programmed to provide the correct responses to web requests in order to serve up a website, all while only using about 250mA (0.25W) of electricity, and I thought that was pretty neat. However, and this is where all of the "excitement" comes in, my internet connection didn't allow for a simple solution like that to work.
Now, most people don't have a static IP for their home internet, and that's so common that I had already worked a dynamic DNS solution into my original plan. My website registrar was fully capable of keeping track of my changing IP and redirecting my website address to wherever I was that week. Great, right? Well, it is, except in this advanced future we're living in, my IP doesn't just change my IP address all the time, it doesn't provide a unique IP address to my home at all.
Yup, a shared IP with my neighbors. They call it a DS-Lite connection, but it makes it basically impossible for me to host my website using IPv4. IPv6, the up-and-coming internet addressing technology, does work with my connection, but that still isn't functional with a lot of people's connections, including on their phones. And that's how I ended up having to use a tunnel to get my server connection out onto the web where it belongs and able to host this site.
I'm not like, anti-Cloudflare. I don't have any reason to be anti-Cloudflare. It's so mainstream, everything is "protected" by Cloudflare these days, but I never thought that I'd have any reason to use their services. And yet here we are, they were the most mainstream solution to my problem, and so I'm using them. This website, that you're reading this on right now (unless it's way far in the future and I've changed things around again), is tunneling through Cloudflare, and they were kind enough to port their tunneling software to ARMv6 so that it'll run on my cute little Pi Zero W, with 400MB of RAM and a 1GHz CPU.
And that, my friends, is why I couldn't end up hosting things on my Pi Pico. There's no tunneling software written for a microcontroller, and I don't feel motivated to look through Cloudflare's code and try to reverse-engineer the correct responses to make mine communicate with their servers. Call me lazy, it's ok! I can take it!
But honestly, the Pi Zero W is still a pretty small computer. And I've had it sitting around for years and haven't done a whole lot with it, so this is its time to shine! It's nice and snappy too, I don't notice any lag serving up my incredibly complex website. At the end of the day, I'm pretty happy with how things turned out. Now, let's see if I can find another project for my Pi Pico... I hope it doesn't sit around and rot for quite as long as the Zero. 🤓
