Why I started this site
A $5.30 domain, a first site built with AI, and a rebuild with Hugo.
Buying the domain
I first bought a domain because I wanted to access Home Assistant from outside my network, and I thought this was the best way to do it. I was wrong (more on that below). Luckily, I came across Tailscale, so I quickly reversed my settings and parked the domain I’d just bought.
Buying a domain was simple. I signed in to Cloudflare with Sign in with Apple and searched for the name I wanted. The first few I tried weren’t available, but practicalhometech.co.uk was, so I bought it too: $5.30 (£3.81) for the year.
Version 1
I bought the domain back in February 2026, and last month I decided to finally use it. I asked Claude to build me a simple static website to start posting to.
Then I came across a YouTube video about Hugo and felt it was a better fit for me and what I wanted, so the website I’d set up with Claude’s help was retired.
Version 2: Hugo
Hugo is written in Go and lets me write posts as Markdown files. I push them to GitHub, and that’s all I have to do to put a new post up. Cloudflare Pages picks up the push, builds the site and publishes it.
What went wrong
The biggest mistake came before the website even existed. To reach Home Assistant from outside the house, I opened a port on my router. That put Home Assistant’s login page on the open internet, where anyone scanning for it could find it and try to get in.
The port was only open for a few days before I found a better way.
Tailscale was the fix. It links my devices to my home network privately, so I can use Home Assistant when I’m out without opening anything on the router. I closed the port, and the domain I’d bought for it now sits there doing nothing.