personal_site/_posts/2025-04-14-a-new-day-a-new-domain.md
2025-06-11 13:14:20 +02:00

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---
title: A new day, a new domain.
layout: post
excerpt: I just registered thod.dev and bought my first VPS.
assets: /assets/blog/a-new-day-a-new-domain
thumbnail: /assets/blog/a-new-day-a-new-domain/thumbnail.svg
social_image: /assets/blog/a-new-day-a-new-domain/thumbnail.png
alt:
image_class: invertable
---
I bought [thod.dev](https://thod.dev) a while back because I wanted a slightly shorter domain to play with than [the one you're at](https://thomashodson.com). In light of what's happening in the US I'm also thinking about starting to get onto the self hosting train. These are my baby steps in that direction.
After browsing [european-alternatives.eu](https://european-alternatives.eu/) and reddit a bit I settled on a €4 a month VPS from [netcup](https://www.netcup.com) to start.
I set up the DNS entries in Cloudfare. Not quite an EU alternative but baby steps. Then I Installed caddy. It took me a while to understand how to configure caddy through systemctl but it's [here](https://caddyserver.com/docs/running) if you need it here. Here's my tiny cheatsheet for caddy:
| | |
|-------------------------------------------------- |-------------------------------------- |
| Change Caddy proxy setup | `code /etc/caddy/Caddyfile` |
| Reload caddy (also status, start, stop, restart) | `systemctl reload caddy` |
| More details on caddy | `journalctl -xeu caddy.service` |
| Who's listening on a port. | `lsof -i :80` |
| See live access logs | `tail -f /var/log/caddy/access.log ` |
| See process logs | `tail -f /var/log/caddy/process.log` |
| Start/stop a service at boot | `systemctl enable [service]` |
My caddyfile is a series of entries like this, they just direct subdomains to internal docker images or servers. Note that it's much easier to setup subdomains i.e `git.thod.dev` than it is to do something like `thod.dev/git/*`.
```caddy
git.thod.dev {
import logging
reverse_proxy localhost:3000
}
music.thod.dev {
import logging
reverse_proxy localhost:4533
}
```
Interesting side note: Caddy handles getting TLS certs and https fr you pretty well! The one slightly unexpected side effect of this is that the moment you get a cert issued (which caddy does automatically) for a subdomain, that will become a matter of public record. There are many many bots configured to automatically start sniffing around for vulnerabilities on your server, here's a snippet of some requests I got within minutes of setting up a new subdomain:
```
GET /@vite/env HTTP/1.1
GET /actuator/env HTTP/1.1
GET /server HTTP/1.1
GET /.vscode/sftp.json HTTP/1.1
GET /about HTTP/1.1
GET /debug/default/view?panel=config HTTP/1.1
GET /v2/_catalog HTTP/1.1
GET /ecp/Current/exporttool/microsoft.exchange.ediscovery.exporttool.application HTTP/1.1
GET /server-status HTTP/1.1
GET /login.action HTTP/1.1
GET /_all_dbs HTTP/1.1
GET /.DS_Store HTTP/1.1
GET /.env HTTP/1.1
GET /.git/config HTTP/1.1
GET /s/3313e22343e28363e2838313/_/;/META-INF/maven/com.atlassian.jira/jira-webapp-dist/pom.properties HTTP/1.1
GET /config.json HTTP/1.1
GET /telescope/requests HTTP/1.1
GET /info.php HTTP/1.1
GET /?rest_route=/wp/v2/users/ HTTP/1.1
```
So far I don't have any data/passwords/private keys/etc on this server that I would particularly mind losing or having stolen. Before changing that I think I'll need to do a thorough security review of this box.
## Experiments so far:
### Mirror of this site @ [thod.dev](https://thod.dev)
This is just a test really, I doubt I'll ever fully move from `thomashodson.com` fully to `thod.dev` but maybe one day!
### Miniflux @ miniflux.thod.dev
I still need to setup some kind of action to rebuild this mirror.
For a few years now I've paid for [theoldreader](https://theoldreader.com/) as an rss reader but lately I wanted some kind of API to access my lists of read and unread posts and couldn't really find it from theoldreader, so I'm starting to switch over to a self hosted miniflux, so far so good!
### Gitea @ [git.thod.dev](https://git.thod.dev)
I've put up a gitea instance and mirrored a couple repos from github. Haven't quite decided how to use this yet!
### Navidrome @ music.thod.dev
I've uploaded various music that I have locally from bandcamp and such to a navidrome instance.
### Tiny Webservers
Since I have this server I seems like a good time to play with so more dynamic stuff. My first foray into that is a tiny rust webserver hosted at [api.thod.dev/tiny_servers/single_threaded](https://api.thod.dev/tiny_servers/single_threaded). It just returns a json response telling you how many times this endpoint has been hit since the last time I rebooted it!
<figure id="hit-counter">
<span>??</span>
<figcaption>
hits since last reboot.
</figcaption>
</figure>
<style>
#hit-counter figcaption {
margin-left: 0.5em;
text-align: left;
width: 6em;
}
#hit-counter {
display: flex;
justify-content: center;
align-items: last baseline;
}
#hit-counter span {
font-family: Impact;
font-size: 5em;
}
</style>
<script type="module">
let counter = document.querySelector("#hit-counter span");
counter.innerHTML = await fetch("https://api.thod.dev/tiny_servers/single_threaded")
.then(response => response.json())
.then(json => json.hits);
</script>
Try it out with `curl -vvv https://api.thod.dev/tiny_servers/single_threaded` and [the webserver code is here](https://github.com/TomHodson/tomhodson.github.com/blob/main/experiments/tiny_webservers/src/bin/single_threaded.rs).