In Praise Of Self-Hosting

One little trend that gives me hope in these times is that a lot of people are starting their own websites. People are trying to return to a time when the internet was more personal, and everything wasn't centralized and aggregated on the same 3-4 platforms. People are starting webrings (please invite me to your webring). People are even trying to bring RSS back!

I tend to have mixed feelings about looking back at early eras of the web with too much nostalgia. Among a certain set it's become popular to yearn for the return of web 1.0, but like, rotten dot com and 4chan were web 1.0 things, not just personal blogs and xkcd. But, that said, I think bringing back fun, community-oriented, DIY stuff is never a bad thing. But a lot of what I'm reading out there stops at "having your own website". This is certainly better than relying on a Substack or whatever - someday the service will die - but there are still a lot of middlemen if you're paying Ghost to host your blog!

I recognize self-hosting is extraordinarily difficult for most normal people. I just think if you have someone in your life (like me) who knows how to Make Website, or especially if you have those capabilities yourself, you should pursue it. Get as close to the metal as you can - in my ideal world we'd all be running our own websites on bare metal. Unfortunately even I have given up on trying to run my personal server from a Raspberry Pi in my house, but I do know how to do it! In the meantime, it's pretty nice to self-host on a non-major but fairly reliable provider (I use Hetzner - they're EU-based so they're GDPR compliant, and I haven't had any issues with them in the three years I've been hosting there). If you're trying to get away from big platforms, WP Engine or Ghost or whatever may not be household names, but you're still trusting a company and server that are totally out of your control. A lot of the links earlier in this piece speak a lot on what's lost when a platform goes down, and a lot of them are journalists who have personally experienced the blogs they worked for going down. There are many factors here but the more you have control over your own infrastructure, the better!

I know why a lot of people don't want to do it. It can be tedious! But if you're running a website as a side project and not a business (if you're a business you probably should not do this), it can also be a pretty fun learning experience. Just don't take it too seriously. Now that I am no longer a freelancer and (for the time being) not particularly worried about constantly selling myself running my own Ghost install and Hetzner server is a fun hobby for me. Sometimes I crash my website, or break things, or accidentally delete a bunch of files (someday I will get better about backups I swear), but I don't worry too much about the one hundred or so people who visit this site a month not being able to access my blog for a day or two.

I'm not sure if this is in the spirit of permacomputing, and it's (currently) not in the spirit of local first computing, but I came across the idea of "let code die" yesterday, and I think it falls squarely in that category. In a bit of serendipity, I also encountered this Albert Brooks quote by way of Conan O'Brien today: "You'll be forgotten. I'll be forgotten. We'll all be forgotten." That should be freeing, not terrifying! If you're working on something you're deeply passionate about, but don't actually think is important on a macro scale - which you should be, whether it's a website or a talk show or a painting or a street performance - have fun with it! Don't let it stress you out! If it does stress you out, let it die! It'll die eventually anyway!

This is as much advice for myself as it is anyone else, but anyway: now is a great time to start a website. If you can, I'd love to see you self-host it too. Do it yourself, have fun with it, and feel free to let it die if you need to. It's better to fail than to never try.