Static Media Archives on a Small VPS

The deployment target is intentionally modest: a Bandwagon VPS with roughly 1 CPU and 1 GB of RAM, already serving other company sites. That constraint rules out a heavy CMS, runtime image processing, database-backed rendering, and server-side video transcoding.

The archive is therefore built as static output. Next.js generates HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and public assets into out/. Nginx serves the folder directly. Cloudflare can cache the result at the edge.

Media Strategy

• Keep original media as static files.
• Use lazy-loaded image grids and fixed aspect-ratio containers to avoid layout shift.
• Use posters for video projects and preload="none" for local video.
• Add future derivatives manually or through an offline build step, not on the VPS.

This keeps the server simple: no Node process, no runtime media pipeline, and no database required.