Self-hosted

Some time ago I subscribed to r/selfhosted, a subreddit about “alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don’t control.”

It’s difficult not to resonate with the ideals of the self-hosted movement: being in control of your data, retaining privacy, no vendor lock-in… As a friend of mine would say, who can argue against freedom? In practice, however, nowdays people don’t want to run their own servers, even if they know how to do it.

For years I’ve hosted blogs on my own server. At different times I ran my own mail server. Not anymore. I don’t want to run a server if there is an alternative. I’m migrating my sites to Jamstack alternatives when possible.

For example, at the time of this writing this site is running on Netlify. Its content resides in a private Github repository, and Netlify automatically rebuilds the site using Hugo every time I publish a new article by pushing it to the repository. I don’t need to manage nor do care which Linux distribution they are deploying. I don’t need to apply the latest security patches to keep the OS up to date. I don’t care if they are serving my content using Apache or other webserver. They provide the results I need.

For 2022, I’ll migrate my other other site to Hugo, and publish it on Netlify or Vercel.

When possible, use a Jamstack or similar solution. Focus on delivering value, automate or delegate the rest.