Bye Bye OVH, Hello GitHub Pages

Be careful - this is an old post and may not work anymore!

OVH (UK) are great for cheap commodity hardware and VPSes etc. Their web hosting packages are fantastic as well. Their management interfaces, not so much. In fact, to be blunt, they suck. And, to be blunt, so does their customer support sometimes.

For example, I signed up for a web hosting package, it came through and everything worked. Then I decided I really didn’t need it and could get away with the emailing package that comes with their domain names and I could use Github Pages to host this blog. One email to customer support asking to cancel the hosting but keep the domain names and email and hosting support was cancelled. Unfortunately this meant their control panel no longer allowed access to my email address(es) at that domain nor could I amend any DNS records.

GitHub Pages

GitHub kindly allow you to create a ‘magic’ repository called <your-username>.gihub.io which they will host and publish on the web for you. For free! In addition, it also natively understands Jekyll.

Nice.

Simply commit your jekyll project to that repository, sans the _site directory, twiddle your thumbs for a few seconds and then visit http://<your-username.github.io and your website should appear!

Who wants http://<your-username>.github.io?

Nobody I expect, that’s why the awesome continues when you realise you can add your own custom domain. To do this, add a CNAME to your repository and update your domain’s DNS servers to add an ALIAS or CNAME to point to github.

OVH DNS

As I said, OVH’s new control panel wasn’t letting me update my DNS settings so I went to the old control panel and updated the A record for colinyates.co.uk to point to github’s IP address, as per here: