Probably The Fastest Website Bootstrap I’ve Ever Done—TheRobExperiment

Breaking My Re-Cycle

As with all projects and experiments, there is more often than not the “Fear of When It Will Get Completed” that will stop most individuals in their tracks from executing and just continue either:

1. Research more on what is the next best plan,
2. Brainstorm on how to best execute the best plan, or
3. The project is not worth starting at all and let’s move to the next new idea.

I myself have been guilty of this process of re-cycling from (1) to (3) in more recent years that I would like to break that cycle and improve my situation by starting with something small… Something small like THEROBEXPERIMENT.

Something Small… Simple… Fast…

After many years of building websites, primarily either just raw code or WordPress, I just realised I haven’t built something that is minimal, clean and fast. I wanted something that looks simple yet still maintains the efficiencies, security and low maintenance system I have grown used to over the years.

Though I have researched quite widely and came across a few new systems like Ghost, or even new technologies like Headless CMS routed through Netlify, I was ultimately convinced that I should build fast with what I already knew, so that I can effectively build a new website from the ground up and break some new personal records!

My last record setup was roughly 8-days straight, re-designing and re-building RobertChai.com and manually sorting out the knicks on existing content to ensure content-legacy continuation.

New Personal Best!

All it took was just 3-days! A definite new personal best! It was key to remind myself of just cutting away over-the-top animations or unnecessary plugins. Just keep the key items that were essential.

From bare-logo-creation, domain-routing, email setups, server-setups, plugin-consolidations, templating-setups, to the site-testings and other content-tweaks, this 3-day 16-hour-days marathon run to set this up over a short weekend was amazingly satisfactory once I got THEROBEXPERIMENT‘s very first post published!

Brief Barebone Breakdown

Over the years, there were many evolving new efficient and effective barebone setups out there. However, this baseline setup is the summary of my last 12-years of personal trial-and-error. Not expect any super-surges in readership for this new website, I have built THEROBEXPERIMENT based on the following:

1. NameCheap—Domain Registrar—A clearly simple domain name management platform that simplifies the user experience while not attempting to outsell other unnecessary services till the checkout process.
2. Cloudflare—DDoS Protection + DNS routing + CDN Caching—Started using them in 2011 and they have been a true godsend providing a very user-friendly frontline routing management system as compared to most backend service providers. Their complementary DDoS Protection + CDN Caching services really improve the user-experience; The “constantly-online” status is maintained while providing a notification screen if your website goes down.
3. DigitalOcean—CPanel + Hosting Services—Best-value for the cheap! You can now sign up and get US$100 worth of free-spending credits for 60-days if you use the following link here. This hosting service is more developer-friendly. It is quite technical to get things moving along here, but they are fast, cheap, and good… Just not-so-easy to set things up.
   
   —OR—
   
   InMotion Hosting—CPanel + Hosting Services—Great service, a good alternative though they are not often the cheapest as compared to the five other hosting platforms I have previously used. Essentially, they have recently revamped their plans recently in Oct 2020 but overall, I just loved the service quality they provide here when dealing with server-side issues. More importantly, their core services help to pre-scan content to keep potential viruses / malware off the server files as long as you did not inject them yourself.