The Info-site: A Name For Something Small Businesses Actually Need

I've been in IT for over 20 years. Infrastructure, networking, server administration, VoIP, containerized deployments, Cloudflare tunnels — that's my world. Building websites has never been part of my job description.

But sometimes a client's actual problem doesn't fit neatly into a category. And the best IT work I've done in my career has always been about solving the real problem in front of me, not the one on the service sheet.

This is about one of those moments — and the concept it led me to name.

The Problem

One of my clients runs a small call center operation. Professional, well-run, growing. He needed a web presence — somewhere potential partners and clients could go to understand what his business does and how to reach him.

The options in front of him looked like this:

• Hire a web developer — $1,500–$3,000+ for a custom build, ongoing maintenance costs, dependency on someone else's availability
• Use a website builder (Wix, Squarespace, etc.) — $15–$40/month subscription, platform lock-in, no control over hosting or data
• WordPress — technically "free," but add hosting, a theme, plugins, and the learning curve and it stops being simple fast

None of these fit. He didn't need e-commerce. He didn't need a blog. He didn't need a booking system or a marketing funnel. He needed something that answered three questions clearly:

Who are you? What do you do? How do I reach you?

That's it. And there was no clean, named solution for exactly that.

What We Built — And What I'm Calling It

Working with AI as a tool in my stack — the same way I'd use any other tool — we put together what I'm now calling an info-site.

The technical reality is simple:

• A single index.html file
• One image asset (the logo)
• Hosted on the client's own server
• Made publicly accessible via a Cloudflare Tunnel (zero open inbound ports)
• Served by an Nginx virtual host on a dedicated port
• Pointed to a custom subdomain via Cloudflare DNS

Total monthly cost: $0. No subscriptions. No third-party platforms. No dependencies that can break or change pricing on you. Full client ownership of every byte.

The Technical Setup (For Those Who Want It)

Here's the exact stack, since this community appreciates specifics:

Server: Debian-based Linux (OMV on bare metal), running as (user)

Web server: Nginx

Tunnel: Cloudflare Tunnel (cloudflared) — named tunnel, not legacy

DNS: Cloudflare — subdomain CNAME pointing to the tunnel

Deployment folder: /home/rna-info/ containing index.html and RnA-blue.png

Nginx virtual host config

server {  
    listen 8085;  
    server_name info.rnaconnection.com;  
    root /home/rna-info;  
    index index.html;  
    autoindex off;  
    server_tokens off;  
    location / {  
        try_files $uri $uri/ =404;  
    }  
}  

Cloudflare tunnel ingress entry (added to /etc/cloudflared/config.yml)

- hostname: info.rnaconnection.com  
  service: http://localhost:8085  

Commands to deploy

# Create and enable the Nginx config  
ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/rna-info /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/rna-info  
nginx -t && systemctl restart nginx  
  
# Register DNS and restart tunnel  
cloudflared tunnel route dns <tunnel-name> info.rnaconnection.com  
systemctl restart cloudflared  

That's the entire deployment. No Docker container for this. No reverse proxy manager. No certificate management (Cloudflare handles TLS termination at the edge). Clean, minimal, maintainable.

The result

You can see the finished info-site live at info.rnaconnection.com — RNA Connections, a bilingual call center and workforce solutions company based in Mexico. Single HTML file, self-hosted, custom subdomain, zero monthly cost. That's the whole thing.

What Makes an Info-Site Different

This is where I think the naming matters.

The web industry has terms for most things — landing pages, brochure sites, marketing sites, portfolios. But none of those quite captures what this is, because they all carry implicit assumptions about purpose:

An info-site isn't trying to close you. It's not running A/B tests on button colors. It's not asking for your email address. It exists to give someone who already has a reason to be interested everything they need to understand the business and make contact.

It's a professional reference point. Nothing more, nothing less.

The defining characteristics

• Informational first — content organized around understanding, not conversion
• Self-hosted and fully owned — no platform dependency, no subscription risk
• Single file or near-single file — lightweight, fast, easy to maintain
• Static — no database, no backend, no attack surface beyond the file itself
• Subdomain-based — often lives at info.yourdomain.com, separate from any main site

Why This Matters for Small Businesses (Especially in Mexico)

Most of my clients are small and mid-size businesses in Hermosillo, Sonora. The gap between "no web presence" and "full website" is enormous in terms of cost and complexity — and most businesses fall into it without a good option.

The info-site fills that gap cleanly:

• A developer or sysadmin can build one in a few hours
• It can be maintained by anyone who can edit an HTML file
• Hosting cost is zero if you already run any kind of server
• It looks professional because it is professional — just focused

For businesses that self-host (Nextcloud, OMV, Proxmox setups are common among my clients), this fits naturally into infrastructure that already exists. One more Nginx vhost. One more Cloudflare tunnel entry. Done.

The Concept, Named

I'm putting a name to this because naming things matters in our field. A named concept can be referenced, discussed, improved, and built upon. "Info-site" is short, descriptive, and immediately understandable — which is more than most jargon manages.

If you've built something like this for a client and called it something else, or struggled to explain what it was — now you have a word for it.

And if you're an IT professional who occasionally finds yourself solving problems that aren't strictly in your lane: that's not a bug in your career. That's what being useful actually looks like.

Hendry Ruiz is an independent IT professional and MSP based in Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico, with 20+ years of experience in infrastructure, networking, VoIP, and systems administration. He operates OpControl I.T. Solutions, providing managed IT services for small and mid-size businesses.