Manton Reece

Micro.blog adding European servers

Starting today there is a new option for customers who want more flexibility for where their blog is hosted. When Micro.blog publishes your blog, it runs your blog posts through Hugo, creating static HTML files that are hosted outside of the main Micro.blog platform. Those files can now be served from a data center in Europe.

Here’s a screenshot of the new checkbox on the Design page:

Screenshot of checkbox and custom domain name interface.

After you enable this setting, there’s one more step: updating the DNS for your custom domain name to use the new servers in Europe. There’s a help page with an overview of DNS settings. If you registered your domain name through Micro.blog, we’ll automatically update the DNS records for you when the checkbox is toggled.

In Europe we’re using Hetzner’s data center in Nuremberg, Germany.

Note that photos continue to be hosted in the United States and made available around the world via our CDN. That way your blog visitors still get photos delivered as quickly as possible whether they are in North America or Europe. Other data on the platform such as draft posts, encrypted notes, and the Micro.blog timeline also remain in the United States.

There is a lot of uncertainty in the United States right now, but Micro.blog is built for the world wide web. Our principles have always included a focus on web identity and permanence, with domain names at the heart of what we do. The distributed nature of the web makes improvements like today’s change possible.

I’d love to hear what you think. We’ll keep exploring how to make the platform as resilient as possible.

Micro.blog domain aliases

I added a new feature to Micro.blog Premium today called domain name aliases. Often when people host their blog on Micro.blog, they later change their mind about the primary domain name for their blog. Now you can more easily redirect multiple domain names to the same blog so no previous links break.

For example, maybe you start with the subdomain micro.yourdomain.com but later want it to just be the root domain yourdomain.com. Micro.blog handles HTTPS and redirecting any path in the URL between domain names.

Here’s a screenshot with a couple test examples for my blog. You can find this feature under Account → New Domain Alias:

Screenshot of adding a new domain alias and a list of existing redirects.

This option is available for Micro.blog Premium subscribers. Micro.blog Premium also includes support for up to 5 separate hosted blogs and any number of single-page websites.