After 14 years of using Drupal for my blog, I said goodbye to Drupal. This has been long overdue.

Self-hosting a PHP website like Drupal comes with quite some maintenance overhead, as there are quite a few components involved:

• Web server (NGINX)
• Database server (MariaDB)
• PHP
• Redis

As security issues are found all the time, it's of vital importance to keep all these components up to date. This can be hard at times. PHP 7.4 was declared EOL more than a year ago, but the blog was still on Drupal 7. Some of the Drupal modules that were in use, were not compatible with PHP 8. So I could either upgrade to a more recent Drupal version, or do something else.

Migrating my blog to a static site generator has been on my todo list for several years, and I made several incomplete attempts before. Today I finally decided it's time. And here we are: as of today, this blog is a static website, generated with Zola! And with that, the maintenance burden of self-hosting everything became a little bit smaller.