Run Your Own Website

I do run my own site. Moreover, I do all the coding, styling, and layout manually and without any 3rd-party libraries or frameworks. Or even in-house libraries for that matter.<p>This works for me in terms of freedom. I can do interactive plots, quizzes, games and all kind of programmable things I can imagine. No restrictions.<p>In fact, I left Medium because I was restricted to text and images only. I want more. I want words and buttons: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wordsandbuttons.online" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wordsandbuttons.online</a><p>But it&#x27;s not really aligned with the reasons from the post. It&#x27;s not a resume. It would have been an awful resume. I wouldn&#x27;t hire myself by this resume.<p>And keeping record is, of course, nice. But it has nothing to do with running your own website. You can keep record on Medium, too. In fact, it would be more effective since it works wonders for the small notes.<p>Still, I totally agree that keeping your own site is a fascinating experience and it&#x27;s well worth time and effort.

At least own your domain name and be able to easily move your website content to whereever you want. I think for most people it&#x27;s cheaper and more convenient to use a hosting service, and that&#x27;s fine... as long as you can change hosting services.<p>I&#x27;ve had my personal site ( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dwheeler.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dwheeler.com</a> ) since 1999. As noted in <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dwheeler.com&#x2F;aboutsite.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dwheeler.com&#x2F;aboutsite.html</a> my site has been hosted on 4 different systems, and I&#x27;m sure that I will move again at some point. Users won&#x27;t notice - or care - because I can easily move to some other service.

Especially given the number of things platforms like YouTube, Reddit and Medium are cracking down on&#x2F;demonetising. For instance, your own host likely won&#x27;t boot you off or interfere if you post cybersecurity related videos&#x2F;articles, like YouTube started to do a few days ago.<p>Having your own site provides a backup in case the platforms you use to promote your work turn on&#x2F;your industry.<p>And don&#x27;t worry about the extra traffic a platform may bring. That&#x27;s why you publish on your own site first, then syndicate your content to other services later.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;indieweb.org&#x2F;POSSE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;indieweb.org&#x2F;POSSE</a>

I can see why this article with a very basic premise is so popular.<p>* It&#x27;s short, so the average reader here has enough attention span for it.<p>* It&#x27;s obvious, so that leaves plenty of room for patting oneself on the back.<p>* It&#x27;s simple, so one can reference their own writings about a similar topic or related to it in some way.<p>* It&#x27;s about a topic that lets the commenter here show off their own website and bloviate about themselves.<p>This is nothing against the author, but against Hacker News and how so much interesting material fails to ever reach the front page.

Yup. People tend to assume running your own site is difficult but running a static webserver is dead simple. As long as you don&#x27;t involve all the unneeded dynamic language and database it&#x27;s secure and doesn&#x27;t really need updating all the time either.<p>90% of people can run a static web server on their home connection and it would fulfill their every requirement (as well as solving almost all &#x27;problems&#x27; that exist on the web). Home connections of a couple megabits are certainly fast enough for a personal site.

&quot;your website as a record&quot; resonates with me. I recently redesigned my website (which is online since 2001) and one new feature I added is a random button. Clicking it will open a random page which is often a blog post I wrote many years ago. It&#x27;s easily the most fun feature for me personally as it makes me remember things of my life... I don&#x27;t know how much other visitors use or like it. If you want, give it a try at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.splitbrain.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.splitbrain.org</a> - it&#x27;s the dice in the menu.

I totally agree with this. While running and maintaining your own website isn&#x27;t trivial enough yet that _anybody_ can just up and do it, it&#x27;s definitely something most anyone willing to spend a weekend can pick up and learn, with maybe a bit of help.<p>Been considering moving towards a static site generator setup myself, and is currently looking at Gatsby.<p>I&#x27;m curious though --- barring preference for language, which generator would you recommend? I keep hearing about Jekyll, Hugo, Gatsby, etc. but haven&#x27;t really come across any objective comparisons between options.

The title made me hope for a quite literal way to run your website: using some kind of energy harvesting (bicycle?) used to power a small computer with a web server.<p>This is an issue that is quite simple to solve. Many podcasters (espescially Joe Rogan) like to talk about being afraid of getting removed from a platform without having your own hosting set up.<p>Most of the controversial big names of youtube and other platforms can and should stay as independent as possible. Twitter and others’ aim is to lure as many people as possible to their platforms. Once you are big enough you should probably seek out an independent way to distribute content.

&gt; Under my definition, you must have 1) total control over your content, and 2) the ability to make it public or private at any time.<p>I run my own website (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;saagarjha.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;saagarjha.com</a>, naturally) but I can&#x27;t guarantee either of these. My host (GitHub Pages) can take down my content at any time if I annoy them enough, and once I make something public I don&#x27;t suffer from the misconception that I can make it private again. I can, however, rehost my content (crucially, <i>at the same &quot;location&quot;</i>), which I think is nearly good enough.

For my personal websites, I only ever tried wordpress around 10 years ago before I built my own from scratch.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;idiallo.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;idiallo.com</a><p>What I find interesting is that a swat of new developers thinks that the only options are:<p>1. free hosting with lock-in platforms (medium, blogger, ...)<p>2. Clever hacks (github, netlify, cloudflare...)<p>3. Expensive hosting ($40&#x2F;m+)<p>The alternative is to use shared hosting for simple content. Or cheap but excellent services like linode, digitalocean, or vultr. They set you back $5&#x2F;m or less.<p>Host your own content, make local backups. If your provider complains, find another host, copy and paste your content and update the dns.

$12 + tax a year for each domain name. If you know a way around this, let me know.<p>Using a single dynamic IP address, if the IP address changes I manually point the domain names to the new IP address. It&#x27;s a bit of a pain, but the IP address really doesn&#x27;t change that often. I could automate this with a great amount of time and trouble. I wish the Domain Registrar didn&#x27;t have such a crazy panel for configuring such things.<p>The ISP gave me a simpler version of their modem for what they call &quot;bridge mode&quot; that doesn&#x27;t block ports. I&#x27;m paying for Internet Service, if they block ports they are not providing that service. The notion of a server is lost on me, there are packets being sent and received over the internet, if they block that they are not providing Internet Service.<p>Port 80 on the home router forwards to a Raspberry Pi. My outages are when the power goes out, the IP address changes, or the ISP goes down.<p>A Raspberry Pi 2 Model B &#x2F; raspbian runs Apache, I&#x27;ve considered trying others like nginx. I don&#x27;t need https and auto-renewing SSL certificates from Let&#x27;s Encrypt, if you want to read something everyone can read it. If someone happens to modify the packets in the middle somewhere out there, so be it. I don&#x27;t want you to login, and I definitely don&#x27;t want your information -- if you have something interesting maybe I&#x27;ll find it out there wherever and on whatever that might be...

&gt; <i>&quot;&lt;body style=&quot;...;display:none;&quot; ...&gt;&quot;</i><p>Please don&#x27;t do this. If your website is your resume, and you intentionally obscure it from me, I&#x27;m not going to hire you.

Any opinions on what are the best software choices for a single person to use in 2019 to build a website from scratch?<p>I’d be willing to learn something new if I knew in 2 years, I’d be extremely productive.

Sheesh, 20 years ago I had a static IP, along with my own server running web, mail, and DNS servers, in my apartment.<p>Either things are more complicated these days, or I just got tired of running it. Probably the latter. Then again, doing something like putting a downloadable file on Wordpress is difficult. It was easy on my own server.<p>At least I still have a static IP and my old domain name.

&gt; [...] Medium, for example, because the company owns all the content you publish there.<p>Is this true? I am absolutely shocked if so.<p>I would assume Medium might get a license to display your content, but do you actually transfer your ownership to them by posting? If so, that&#x27;s dastardly wicked.

This type of post makes it to the front page pretty frequently, but I think the audience on hacker News vastly underestimates the difficulty of setting up a personal site for the general public. There is always the refrain of &quot;but just use static HTML!&quot;, as if anyone even knows what that is, as if it&#x27;s so easy to set up a domain and hosting, as if no one even wants a nicely designed site with images and JavaScript that&#x27;s easy to maintain. Even as a technologically literate person, I find the hassle of maintaining my own static personal website far more onerous than it has to be. Platforms are not great, but they are the only way that most people will ever interact with the web.

Anyone has interesting themes for Jekyll&#x2F;Hugo? I liked the layout in this blog - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jotaen.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jotaen.net&#x2F;</a> However, it is a custom template.

I think this is great advice and I tend to agree with it.<p>However, TechLead has recently given me pause. He spun up his YouTube channel and then quickly monetized it by dropping Paypal links into the video descriptions. He later made a video talking about doing this and how he thought it was a waste for people wanting to sell dresses, for example, to build a site with a cart and checkout, etc, instead of just selling right where their audience already was.<p>At the size his channel is now, I think it&#x27;s a bit crazy of him not to have a site, but he&#x27;s had larger success as an entrepreneur than I have thus far...

Every creator who relies on internet for income should have their website separately, there is no excuse, its cheap to get lots of storage , and most hosting providers are not hellishly censorious like social media. What we need is a wordpress-like system that allows uploading and tagging everything in a consisten format with itemproperties. Then, e.g. youtube could autoimport a videos from the feed when asked to. I dont know if such a system exist, but it seems pretty obvious that everyone who sells their content through social media should have an online fallback&#x2F;backup.

There are various platform like - usercv.com, about.me who provides personal resume website without coding.<p>github.io is already there who provides such thing if someone knows coding.

I&#x27;ve been running this since 1995 - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wittenburg.co.uk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wittenburg.co.uk</a>. Most of the stuff on it isn&#x27;t public (lists, home photos, documents) and I can&#x27;t imagine not having it.<p>It&#x27;s super lightweight and yes, I still use HTML tables. Because they&#x27;re easier to understand 5 years later than div tags.

Don&#x27;t forget one small nuance: own website requires much (MUCH) more time for initial setup, than any other solution as service which is suggested instead. Especially if it&#x27;s not a simple static site. And probably for maintenance as well (but it&#x27;s debatable). Even for tech guys (especially those, who&#x27;s not in webdev).

I run my website too (see profile). I use only Jekyll to compile it locally. I did my own CSS framework <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;meerita&#x2F;utilcss" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;meerita&#x2F;utilcss</a>. I host it on a DO instance. I deploy it from a local terminal command.

What I’d like to see is a geocities but with: database, server side scripting, caching, memcache, and https free for limited use with a performance and availability guarantee. What would it take to get this on a massive scale?

This seems like a good place to ask. Are there any free and reliable services to notify you when your website&#x2F;web service is unavailable?

I do and pay about $10&#x2F;year for my VPS... so about $20 per year with domain name (domain names are overpriced)... I&#x27;m thinking about going to IP only... that way it would not crap out when google&#x27;s DNS goes down...

And when you do, please consider limiting the width of your content to 60-80 characters.