Until recently, my domain was hosted by my domain registrar. This had multiple reasons:

  • It was simple - They provided the web space including FTP access. I just had to push my files to this web server, and they did all the hosting magic.
  • It was without worries: I was quite worried about data collection - with privacy in mind, I was not sure if I could do that properly. So I had sourced that out.
  • And finally, I didn’t have to think about technical things like uptime, TLS certificates, and other stuff. At that time, I did not want to bother with these things on a semi-professional base.

Since then, a lot has changed. And for multiple reasons, it was time to host my blog myself.

Deployment

After doing the first few deployments by hand, I quickly decided to automate that. So I setup a CI/CD system (Drone at that time) and created a pipeline that would automatically build and deploy the blog. This was quite simple at that time: Drone has really many images one can just use, and they work quite good. Pushing something to an FTP server turned out to be really not hard that way.

But over time, I started to dislike Drone. I only used it for two use cases anyways, and these two use cases quite often failed to work, so I in the end had to manually trigger them or sometimes even just do the steps manually. So Drone was not really reliable to me.
And then, one day, Drone was bought by some other company, and they started hiding things behind a paywall. I don’t like that in open source apps, so it was time to look for an alternative.

Enter Forgejo. I switched from Gitea to Forgejo quite some time ago, and now I finally got to setup a Forgejo Runner. Altough not yet production-ready, I already like this runner. It does everything I want in a good way. Also, since the workflows are strongly compatible with Github Actions, there is a lot of tutorials and blogs out there.

And in the end, my decision was clear: Get rid of Drone. One use case was already migrated quite soon, and my blog was the last thing that stood in the way of this goal.

Privacy

When having setting up my blog, I was concerned about privacy. Knowing Austria’s DSGVO, I had in mind to just not collect any data at all (let’s ignore my Plausible setup for now…).

I did not really have an idea how to do that, and my hosting provider gave me the simple opportunity: Sign a data contract with them and let them collect the data. Not my problem any more.

Turns out: You won’t need a data contract if you don’t track any private data. So I turned off the access logs of my server, and I am fine!

A note about Plausible: Here, I do collect data. But I do that in a privacy respecting way, without tracking a user more than required. So in my mind, this is okay.

Hosting

Turns out, nginx is really helpful here. I configured the website, and with unattended-upgrades, this really doesn’t leave me a lot to do. I shopped a server at Hetzner quite some time ago, and it is running amazingly smooth. This blog is hosted on that server, so I am fine.

Uptime

I was not sure if I am able to provide uptime guarantees for my blog which I thought are really important. But over time, I started to realize hat uptime is really not too important at a personal blog. If it is down for a day or so, this won’t hurt many people. So why worry about it?

Also, I started using Uptime Kuma and turns out, the uptime of my apps is not too bad! I usually don’t reach four or even more nines, but two to three nines (aka. an uptime of 99%) is really realistic.

TLS

For a long time, TLS was a problem for me. I had to do that manually, and about every three months. Somewhere end of last year, I decided that I don’t want to do that any more. I then found acme.sh and their DNS alias concept for wildcard TLS certificates. With that, I started to have a quite good concept for TLS certificate management, which I also extended to get single-domain certificates. And now this works out as expected!

Summary: Experience!

So, my learning is quite simple: First, start small. Let companies do the things you cannot or don’t want to do yourself. Learn on the way, work your way through the challenges. Some day, you will find the dependency on the company frustrating, and at the same time, be able to do it yourself. Then, it’s time to switch!