Infrastructure

You have a site running on a server somewhere. It works. But right now, anyone who knows your IP address can hit it directly, bots can crawl it without limits, and you are relying on Let’s Encrypt renewals not breaking at 3 AM. Cloudflare’s free plan fixes all of this in about fifteen minutes. This post walks through the setup end to end: what Cloudflare actually does, how to put it in front of your site, and which free features are worth turning on. ...

You have a static site — HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. You want it on a real domain, deploying automatically when you push. This post is the exact playbook I use to get a site from “works locally” to “live at yourdomain.com with zero-touch deployments.” The stack: a DigitalOcean droplet, nginx, and GitHub Actions deploying via rsync. The Full Picture Before getting into steps, here is what the end state looks like: ...

Type abhijitmohanty.com into a browser and hit enter. About 50 milliseconds later, a server somewhere responds with HTML. That jump — from a human-readable name to a machine-reachable address — is DNS. It happens billions of times a day and almost nobody thinks about it. This post breaks down exactly how it works: the lookup chain, the record types, and how all the distributed pieces fit together. The Problem DNS Solves Computers talk to each other using IP addresses — numbers like 192.0.2.1 or 2001:db8::1. Humans are bad at remembering numbers. DNS (Domain Name System) is the phone book that maps names to numbers. ...

This site runs on Hugo, deploys to GitHub Pages for staging, and ships to a DigitalOcean droplet for production. The entire pipeline is a single GitHub Actions workflow. Push to main, preview on staging, approve, and it goes live. Here is exactly how it works, step by step. If you want to build something similar, this post is your blueprint. Why Hugo Hugo is a static site generator written in Go. It takes Markdown files, applies a theme, and outputs plain HTML. No database, no server-side rendering, no JavaScript framework. Just files. ...