My windows server died and took my recipe app down with it

Yo yo yo, whats good. It's Digital Dylan coming back at ya with another word vomit from my last two brain cells. 

A couple days ago, I woke up at 2am to the worst sound a Windows computer could make, the death beep. Blaring louder than my alarm, I had to get up and yank the power cord out of the computer before I crawled back to bed. 

This Windows computer that turned into a cuckoo clock in the depths of the night was an old computer that my family used. I, being the technology hoarder I am, have kept it for the past 5 years or so. A couple of months ago, I finally found a use for it. I turned it into a local host machine to host the recipe database website that I had been working on (recipes.dylanastrup.com). This worked out perfectly. I got to learn about local website hosting, networking, DNS management, and (the best part) I got to host it for free. I didn't really have a better spot to put it, so it ended up next to my dresser, a solid 5 feet away from my sleeping setup. Next to this Windows computer was also a linux machine so I could learn more about CentOS and RHEL when I'm not at work, as well as my office-sized printer, both of which I also acquired for free. If you haven't noticed by now, I'm a big fan of free things. I swear I'm not a hoarder though. Maybe just a little bit. 

Now, some of you may be asking, "yo Dylan, why do you have a Windows computer right next to your bed?" or "Don't you have a Mac?" or "Dylan, you're so good with technology, how could your computer just die like that?". These are all valid questions, some of which I can answer, but none of which I will answer right now.

Anywho, now that this computer as making this death beep, I had to explore what was wrong. The death beep is usually a hardware issue with either the RAM or the motherboard. I tried swapping out the RAM but the death beep prevailed. It likely means its a motherboard issue, and for a 10+ year old computer that shipped originally with Windows Vista on it, I decided that it wasn't worth any additional troubleshooting. I pronounced the trusty old computer dead on September 29th at 5:31pm local time. 

Now that I lost my free local host for my recipe website, I had to find a replacement. And Dylan being Dylan, I wanted to see if I could do it for free of course. So, I turned to my new AI amigo, Google's Gemini. I've been hearing good things about Gemini (from Sean, so it's not like he's biased at all or anything), and everything I've seen shows Gemini 2.5 Pro is the best coding agent. So I stopped paying for ChatGPT plus and found out that I get Gemini 2.5 Pro for free through my family plan with mi hermano. 

Gemini did a little research for me and found a couple sites that can host databases and interactive websites that have decent free tiers. I settled on Render to host the backend Netlify to host the frontend. Both seemed to have all the services I needed to host my recipe database website. Although, for Render's free tier, the service spins down after 15 minutes of inactivity. So this might be slighlty annoying for users coming to the site since they'll have to wait 30-60 seconds for the backend to spin back up. But, its free and works, and for anyone that chooses to use my recipe website they already know its still littered with bugs as I continue development on it. 

After a couple hours of troubleshooting and adapting my frontend and backend repositories to be in the correct format for cloud hosting, I finally revived Recipes.dylanastrup.com. Now that the public site is back up and running, its motivated me to continue developing it. The basic features are there, you can create, edit, and view recipes, but I want to work on the general UI and slowly build more features. 

All in all, an old windows computer making the death beep has taught me a lot about cloud hosting and gave me a good chance to test out Gemini's coding abilities (which I can confidently say is leaps and bounds better than any code ChatGPT ever wrote for me).

Now if anyone's reading this, please go visit Recipes.Dylanastrup.com, give it a couple seconds to load (cause I'm cheap), and try to find bugs or ideas on how to improve the site. Drop them in the comments or add them to the Github issues. I'm always looking for new ideas to implement on the website. 

If you made it this far, please go click around on my sites (anything linked on dylanastrup.com), so I get to see my Google Analytics spike for a little bit. 

I still don't know how to sign off a blog, so bye. 

xoxo,

Dyl