Server Config Sucks

Getting a site live and online sucks. Sometimes it’s like the final boss. Not the flashy one — the one with a broken hitbox and twelve phases. The kind that makes you question your life choices halfway through. Building a site from the ground up kind of feels like that.

The struggle to get everything up, and then — just when it finally starts to go your way — BAM, you break your Hugo site. You’re tired, and you don’t quite remember how you did it… or if it even happened.

Then you go to push to the server with that cool script you wrote, and Nginx doesn’t know where your files are — because you didn’t tell it.

Some nights are all about the grind.

And yeah, you think:

“I could’ve just used a 1-click installer, thrown WordPress on a shared host, and called it a day. What was I thinking doing this the hard way?”

But sometimes the struggle makes you stronger.

Because once you beat it, something clicks.

You sit back, reload your browser for the hundredth time, and it finally just works.

Not because you Googled the problem and pasted in the ‘solution’.

But because you finally understood the problem and fixed it.

At 2am, when you’re tired and wanted to call it quits.

Now you smile. Everything is working as it should.

Your server is running lean and mean. Just like you like it. You check all the links to make sure everything still works and you aren’t imagining things. But you nailed it…

No more generic Nginx 404s. Your custom page is showing — and someone is going to laugh when they see it, because it’s real.

No more wondering if your CSS file is even being loaded. The site is up, the favicon is crisp, and the footer actually shows up where it’s supposed to — at the bottom — because you used Flexbox like a boss.

That feeling — that click — is real. And it’s earned.

This post is for every dev still in the ring.

If you’re debugging a deploy script at 2AM,

If you’re learning rsync because FTP sucks,

If you’re staring at the command line on your server trying to remember how to reload nginx using systemd since you’ve been running OpenRC on another project…

I see you.

Keep grinding.

Keep hacking that Gibson.

You’ve got this.