Self-Host and Tech Independence: The Joy of Building Your Own

Summary

After watching the two PewDiePie videos where he learned about installing Arch (something considered quite hard, even for Linux enthusiasts) and building three products (camera for the dog, weather/drinking/meditation device, and who knows what comes next) based on open-source, 3D-printed parts, I started wondering about building things yourself, self-hosting, and tech independence. Something dear to my heart for a while. If people ask me how they should start writing or how to get a job, I always say to buy a domain first. Secondly, host your own blog website if you have the technical skills (although it’s not so hard anymore). Because all of this compounds over time. Of course, you can start with a ready-made blog and a URL not yours, but if you want to do it long term, I saw many people changing from WordPress to Medium to Substack to Ghost, so what’s next? Over that time, sometimes they didn’t migrate their long-effort blog posts but started new. Every time they had a new domain. To me, that’s so sad. Of course, you have learned a lot, and sometimes it’s also good to start new, but imagine instead if that happened over 10 years. If you compare that 10-year blog that has the same domain, keeping hard-earned backlinks, showcasing your long-term investment with old blog posts, even though they might not be as good as current ones (but doesn’t that happen all the time), what a huge difference that would be? As someone who has hosted my own stuff for quite a while, and has been adding more every year, I thought I would write a short article about it. My Own Story I self-host my blog, my second brain, my book, my subscriber list (with Listmonk), implemented my own paywall with Memberstack, and have had my own website and blog for almost all my life (started my own domain, built WordPress, moved to GoHugo). Lately, I also went into Homelab and built my own Home Server with SSH, backup, photos, Gitea, etc. Setting up my own configuration for Reverse Proxy and SSL Certif...