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In Stephen King’s On Writing, he devotes a whole chapter to discussing ‘toolboxes’—the skills and knowledge each writer employs in their everyday practice.

I would like to use this blog to share some of the tools in my web dev ‘toolbox’. As someone who has been dabbling in coding and design since 2005 (and doing it professionally since 2011), there are tons of tips and tidbits that I’ve collected (and thrown out) over the years that you might find valuable.

I think this is going to be most useful to other web developers, but also individuals who would like to start a website but cannot afford to hire a web consultant or web developer.

I plan to start with my go-to Hosting Providers and branch out to other tools in future posts, so be sure to stay tuned to my LinkedIn feed for more updates.

DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean is a cloud provider that offers a wide array of services related to hosting websites and web apps. I find their services to rival Amazon’s AWS platform but with a much simpler interface and pricing model.

Before switching to DO in 2022, I used Linode (now Akamai) to host all websites (client and personal). At the time, I found the service and pricing to be equal except they were frequently undergoing maintenance and unexpected periods of downtime. In almost 2 years of DO, I haven’t experienced any noticeable downtime.

While their tools are relatively easy compared to competitors, I wouldn’t recommend them for a tech novice. These are bare-bones hosting tools and your average user may not know what to do with them. But definitely my recommendation for other programmers, developers, or even tech-savvy individuals looking to host multiple websites or robust web applications.

GitHub Pages

This is a neat little hack for my fellow lazy developers. If you have a simple static site that you need hosted in a jiffy, one quick-and-dirty method is redirecting a domain to a free GitHub project page. GitHub has integrated build tools and you can configure DNS in the repository settings.

There are some limitations, for sure. You wouldn’t want to do this with every site, but for a simple brochure page, this is a cheap and relatively easy alternative to paid hosting.

Don’t believe me? The landing page for my website, for example, is being automatically generated and served from a GitHub repository using GitHub Pages.

Well, that’s all. Hope you found this helpful and I’ll be back next time with more tools from my toolbox. Catch ya later.