Until recently, this site ran on WordPress, hosted on an AWS Lightsail server. It cost about eight Australian dollars a month. Not a lot. But it was a bill that turned up whether I touched the site or not, for a server I had to keep patched and running.
I wanted two things: to stop paying for it, and to stop maintaining a database and a CMS I rarely opened.
Here’s the honest part. I work in solution architecture, mostly around platforms and data, and I care about getting real value for the money spent. I don’t spend my days writing application code, though, and I won’t pretend otherwise. So for the code itself, I used an AI coding assistant. I described what I wanted, made the design calls, and it wrote the site: a fast static site with a small blog.
Everything around the code was mine to set up. I created the GitHub repository. I set up the project on Cloudflare Pages, which rebuilds and hosts the site for free every time I push a change. And I did the DNS work at Squarespace, where my domain lives, to point the address at its new home.
That last part was the one real headache. The www address was easy. The bare domain, with no www, wasn’t: it can’t point straight at this kind of host, and it shares records with my email, so the obvious redirect was off the table. The fix was a forwarding rule at Squarespace, once I understood why the simple version wouldn’t work. Email stayed untouched the whole time, which was the thing I most wanted to protect.
Then there was the old writing. My journal posts lived inside WordPress. Rather than copy and paste them across, I pulled them out through WordPress’s own API, images and all, and turned them into plain Markdown files. They’re just text in a folder now. Nothing to log into.
So where did it land?
Same site. It loads faster. To publish, I edit a file and push it to GitHub, and a minute later it’s live. Hosting costs nothing. The only bill left is the domain, around twenty-seven dollars a year, which I was always going to pay anyway.
What stayed with me is the split. As an architect, my value here was in the decisions, not the typing: what to build, how the pieces fit, what not to break. The AI wrote the code. I did the architecture and the plumbing. That felt about right.
If you’ve got a small site sitting on a server you’re quietly paying for, it’s worth a weekend. You might be surprised how little of it needs an engineer, and how much just needs someone who knows what they want.