Migrating Away from DigitalOcean, Part One

As part of my plan to move from Digital Ocean to alternative hosting, I need to start picking away at some of the services hosted on my droplets. I may as well start with the oldest first: I've got a droplet with an uptime of 1300 days. I named it Fridge. It's acting as a static site host for a couple of sites, including this blog. Mostly, though, it exists to be an "apex domain bouncer". You see, lots of services let you host a Custom Domain on their platform. However, few of them properly handle the www. subdomain versus the "naked domain" or "apex domain". If users want their site to be example.org, that's fine, but what happen if a browser tries to visit www.example.org? And what about the other way around, where the user wants their domain to be www.example.org and people type in the naked domain name - only to land on an error page? That's what a bouncer does. It redirects all the lost patrons to the proper domain. So for me to retire this ancient droplet (running Ubuntu 14.04!…