𝓐 𝓨𝓮𝓪𝓻 𝓼𝓲𝓷𝓬𝓮,
It’s been a year since I deployed my portfolio website. And now when I look back, I came a long way since then. TBH the design is not mine cuz I suck at UI designing and at the time I didn’t even fully understand JavaScript (funny enough only knew about Js algorithms back then).

Initially, the site used PHP as its backend language & I hosted the site on Infinityfree cuz at the time it was the only hosting provider I could find that was free to host a PHP site. But with Infinityfree, one of the biggest problems I faced was they didn’t support PHP’s native mail functionality. So, either I had to drop the contact form or find an alternative way. After a lot of googling, I found a way to send emails with custom SMTP servers. Since I didn’t want to pay for an SMTP service I managed to set up emails using google’s SMTP server with my personal Gmail.

Even though it worked ok, the website’s speed was so slow. After several months, I found out about Cloudflare pages, and I wanted to migrate my site to them. But the problem was they only support static sites, so that means I couldn’t use PHP. So, I was able to redesign the site to use only client-side languages except for the contact form. However, by now I had some knowledge about Js and the rest APIs, So I did a little bit of research and found the Mailgun email service. They gave me the ability to send emails with their rest API but there was only a 3-month trial other wise I had to pay a monthly subscription. However, I signed up for the trial and set up my email API endpoints on Cloudflare workers.

With that on 2022.04.24, I deployed my site with Cloudflare pages and workers & website speed improved a lot.
But still, I wanted a permanent solution for the email problem. And that’s when I found out about SendGrid. They offered a trial for email solutions with 100 emails per day and that was more than enough for me. However, I had to contact them privately and explain how I’m going to use their service, to get my free plan activated because they were concerned about using their resources for spam emails.

On 2022.06.17, I decided to “GoFullStack” & add an API to it. It wasn’t necessary, but I wanted to add a backend to my site. So, with the help of Deta, I added a NodeJS back-end and created an API to fetch the certificate details.

Fast forward to the present, now it is a fully functional full-stack website with, a 100% SEO score and milliseconds of response time.
I can send and receive unlimited emails and have unlimited email addresses under my domain with 0$ cost.

Also, there is a status site that shows the uptime status of my websites (status.supunsathsara.com) with a built-in real-time notification system, which means if the site goes down there are telegram bots, and discord bots to notify me and also there is a Twitter bot that gonna send out a tweet about the incident. (Currently, I’m working on a WhatsApp notification system & will deploy it soon)

Finally what I’m most proud of is the fact that all these things only cost me like $10 per year. Also, that is only for the domain and otherwise, all the operations are free. Nevertheless, I believe I can proudly say it is better than most of the sites out there that cost a fortune to maintain.
So here’s to another year 🍻

: ८Һυ੮੮૯