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From Shopify to Kubernetes: The Epic Infrastructure Journey of ThePetInfoHub.com

Every website has a story, but few have traveled as far—literally and technically—as ThePetInfoHub.com. What started as a simple hosted storefront has evolved into a state-of-the-art, self-hosted engineering marvel.

Here is the story of our journey from the basics to the bleeding edge.

1. The Beginning: Shopify

Like many great projects, we started where it was easiest. Shopify gave us our start. It was simple, hosted, and “just worked.” But as we grew, we realized we needed more control. We didn’t just want a store; we wanted a platform. The constraints of a SaaS ecosystem were starting to hold us back. We needed freedom.

2. The First Leap: Germany & WordPress

We made the bold decision to leave the walled garden. We spun up a VPS (Virtual Private Server) in Germany and performed our first major migration: converting everything to WordPress.

Suddenly, we had access to the file system, the database, and the code. We could customize everything. The site was ours, running on bare metal in a data center thousands of miles away. It was fast, it was liberated, but it was just the beginning of our self-hosting addiction.

3. Bringing It Home: The Raspberry Pi 4

Why pay for a server in Germany when you can host it on your desk? In a move that proved you don’t need enterprise hardware to run a serious website, we migrated the entire stack to a Raspberry Pi 4.

Running off a tiny ARM processor in our own home, ThePetInfoHub became a true “home lab” success story. We dealt with dynamic IPs, router configurations, and the thrill of knowing our production server was small enough to fit in a pocket. It was efficient, personal, and surprisingly capable.

4. The Virtualization Era: Proxmox

As we added more services and our needs grew, the single Pi wasn’t enough. We graduated to Proxmox.

We moved from running on bare metal to running in a virtualized environment (VM). This gave us snapshots, backups, and the ability to spin up test environments instantly. The site was now running in a robust, enterprise-grade hypervisor environment. We were learning the ropes of professional system administration.

5. The Endgame: Kubernetes Cluster

And now, we have arrived at the summit.

Today, ThePetInfoHub.com runs on a custom-built, High-Availability Kubernetes Cluster.

We aren’t just running a server anymore; we are running an orchestration platform.

  • Orchestration: Kubernetes manages our workloads, automatically restarting them if they fail.
  • Storage: We use Longhorn for distributed block storage, meaning our data is replicated across multiple physical nodes. We can lose a drive or an entire computer, and the site stays up.
  • Network: Traffic is secured via Cloudflare Tunnels, routing requests directly into our cluster without exposing ports to the internet.

From a drag-and-drop builder to a multi-node, self-healing, distributed cloud native cluster—this has been an incredible journey of learning and engineering.

Welcome to the new, indomitable ThePetInfoHub.com.