FearlessCMS is Live on Its Own VPS

Today FearlessCMS moved off the static export we'd been running on Netlify and onto its own VPS on DartNode. It's a small thing, but it feels like a real milestone — the project now has its own server instead of just riding on a static build.

I'd hoped to get in on DartNode's free hosting tier for open source projects, but that program requires 1,000+ GitHub stars. FearlessCMS is sitting at 14 stars right now, so that wasn't in the cards. No hard feelings, though — the plan I landed on instead is cheap enough that I went ahead and pre-paid a few months up front, so hosting is a solved problem for a while.

Running on a real VPS instead of a static export opens up a lot of doors down the line: dynamic features, easier testing in an environment closer to what actual users will run, and one less dependency on a third-party platform for the project's core home. For a flat-file CMS built around fork neutrality and staying out of anyone's walled garden, having it live on infrastructure I control feels like the right direction.

Next up: getting FearlessCMS some more visibility — starting with finally posting about it on Neocities, which has been on the to-do list for a while now.