Since 2002, this site has been running on WordPress or some other dynamic site, hand-crafted in one form or another. And it’s always been self-hosted or at least self-managed.

I covered this already in 2020, but five more years have gone by and I’m nostalgic again, and thinking of another switch. Check out 18 Years of Blogging. 23 now!

The initial 2002 incarnation was a set of PHP, HTML, and CSS pages handcrafted on the RIT web server in my ~/public_html directory. Certainly no database at THIS time.

The follow-up version was hosted in my rented bedroom in the closet running on an old Mac G4. I compiled Gentoo to run my web, DNS, and Mail on that little PowerPC processor. I learned so many things having to compile from scratch for a relatively non-standard architecture. More importantly, hosting mail, DNS, web, and NTP from my closet was a great opportunity to learn how things work.

Now I’m pretty sure at this time I was using the Serendipity or other close to hand-crafted PHP framework, rolling my own database. Probably MySQL. That’s about when I added Gallery to host all the images I was taking on my handheld digital camera. Remember those? I took a lot of pictures that you can see, at least for now.

Around 2009 things got an upgrade when I moved to a Pentium x86 (32 bit I think) under my desk in my OWN apartment. The G4 got donated in the move to the downtown apartment and I believe that’s when I migrated everything to WordPress.

Maybe around 2011, 2012, I decided self-hosting under my desk wasn’t reasonable. MOSTLY because Comcast at the time kept changing my public IP and randomly blocking incoming ports. Also, Amazon Web Services and EC2 were taking off. I wanted to have a toe in that water, so I created a free-tier EC2 instance and migrated my database, web server, and WordPress over to “The Cloud”. As a bonus, I also spun up an IRC server for my friends to chat on. Encrypted with ZNC Bouncer if I remember.

That’s where things have sat for the last ~13 years. With an exception of migrating from Gallery to Piwigo in 2020. Over time I’ve steadily increased the size of the EC2 instance to hold more photos and added more RAM for the every-hungry databases. I ditched all DNS, NTP, and Mail services during the migration to AWS. I also recently (a few years back) ditched the IRC service. My friend group chat moved to Discord, and now to Signal.

So now I have the following problems:

1. This is simply not how the web is delivered anymore in 2025. No one builds a VM to host a modern site as far as I can tell. The way of the future appears to be static site generation pushed to Content Distribution Networks like Cloudflare, using Netlify, or even GitHub Pages.
2. Amazon raised their prices for a public IP and my reserved instance expired. I’m now looking at $20 per month, or a 1-year commitment up front to get a cheaper reserved instance. It would still be about 9 bucks a month because of the IP and storage.
3. I’m sick of managing another server. So many updates all the time, and in theory the server itself is secure, but it’s really my responsibility. I can’t manage another Ubuntu dist upgrade. The last one had me pulling my hair out with so many breaking changes I had to sort out in all my config files.
4. WordPress and a database. My site is just a few hundred posts. I really don’t think you need something like WordPress to manage it. Nor do you need the gigabytes of RAM for that database. My site would be faster with static pages.

All of these reasons push me toward a static site generator like 11ty, combined with some hosting solution like Cloudflare, Netlify, or GitHub pages. Worst case, I could just build the static site with 11ty and host it in my closet, in a Docker container, accessible through a Cloudflare tunnel.

What would I lose?

First, comments. But they are the reason I need to pay an additional $24 per year to Akismet for Spam prevention, and RARELY EVER does someone comment on a post before my “turn off comments” period kicks on. I don’t know the solution to comments – but I think I could live just fine without them.

Second – if you go back and read that 2020 post – I never REALLY figured out my image problem. I just migrated everything to Piwigo, deleted Gallery, and left all the old posts with images in them broken. On top of that, I haven’t really uploaded new images to Piwigo. I *could* host some modern Dockerized image site (like Immich) in my closet and give people authenticated login access to it, but there is something about sharing all my personal photos online that is deeply unappealing now. It seemed fine before, when the Internet was a cool corner hangout where all my friends were – but it’s not that anymore.

Third – Themes. I used to know the most rudimentary CSS, but no more. I tried to look at a CSS tutorial or blog starter for 11ty, and it broke my brain. Maybe I could download some starter and modify it SLIGHTLY and still get what I wanted, but the ability to browse for and just apply a WordPress theme was pretty nice.

So could I just convert all my blog posts to a static site, and completely remove my photo gallery? I’d save $26 a month. I’d also learn some new technology. Not only that, my blog updates would add to my Git commit history 😉

That’s what I’m thinking. Leave a comment below. It might be the last chance you ever have.