Skip to main content

How this page reached you

Colophon.

This site is not on anyone's cloud. It is served from my own homelab — and that is the point: the stack is part of the argument. A page that claims production experience should be delivered like production.

The serving path

Five hops, one of them mine

  1. Browser

    You request orieult.com. Static HTML and CSS, no client-side framework, no third-party request of any kind.

  2. Cloudflare edge

    DNS and TLS terminate here. The certificate is Cloudflare's universal certificate; the origin address is never published.

  3. Cloudflare Tunnel

    An outbound-only connection opened from my homelab to the edge. No inbound port is opened on my network, and there is no public IP to find — the whole architecture works behind CGNAT. The uplink itself is a 5G router with its own SIM: a deliberate choice not to depend on a fixed-line ISP.

  4. Nginx, in an LXC container

    On an Intel NUC running Proxmox at home. It serves a directory of files, and nothing else.

  5. A symlink

    The document root is a symlink to the current release. Deployment swaps it; rollback swaps it back.

The build

  • Astro static build with Tailwind CSS. Plain HTML and CSS reach your browser, plus a few lines of vanilla JavaScript for the scroll animations — no framework is shipped.
  • Self-hosted variable fonts — Inter, Space Grotesk and JetBrains Mono, subset to Latin. No CDN, no font service, no external request.
  • No analytics, no trackers, no cookies. Nothing to consent to, because nothing is collected.

The deployment

  • One command builds, syncs a timestamped release to the server, and flips the current symlink. The switch is atomic; nothing is ever served half-updated.
  • Previous releases stay on disk, so a rollback is one symlink away — the same pattern as the other sites I run.
  • Git is the source of truth for content and configuration, on a self-hosted Forgejo forge — in line with how the rest of the infrastructure is run.

The bigger picture

One slice of a larger machine

This site is a few hundred kilobytes on an infrastructure of 30+ production services — GenAI backends, APIs, monitoring, automation, networking, backups, local LLM inference — designed and operated solo, with no one else on call.

Serving a static site this way is not the efficient choice. It is the honest one: everything this site claims about operating systems in production is being demonstrated by the act of you reading it.

More on the homelab →