Why I decided to make a self-hosted blog

This post was written to the sound of techno. Here’s the playlist:

Self-hosting was neither my first nor second choice, but in the end, I still arrived at self-hosting. This post won’t be a technical deep-dive on the implementation, but rather a journey through my past experiences that led to this decision. If that sounds like your kind of journey, read on.

For those who don’t know what self-hosting is, the first sentence of Wikipedia on self-hosting covers it pretty well:

Self-hosting is the practice of running and maintaining a website or service using a private web server, instead of using a service outside of the administrator's own control.

I've tried different approaches to content creation and managing a blog, but all seemed off. I had a YouTube channel and was streaming on Twitch for a couple of years, on and off, with gaming content. I tried writing a blog on Blogger, but that was quite restrictive and didn't suit my creative interests. I even tried uCoz (Eastern Europeans will remember it) and Medium, but I didn’t click with the pre-made designs. All of these things were fun at the time, but they didn’t last long for me. At that point, I understood that the way to go for me is self-hosting.

Here is the thing: I am a geek who is ready to spend 24/7 on debugging different configurations of my local machines and tools. There was a point in my life when I was reinstalling Linux every couple of months, because I would mess around with the configuration so much that it would break, and the only way to restore it would be to reinstall it. From this experience, I gained some lessons. They were:

1. Never keep important things only locally. For me, storing things on USBs and the Cloud became the norm, because having them on my Linux was too risky and, in a way, volatile, even though the memory within the machine was supposed to be non-volatile.
2. To learn how something works, you first need to learn how it does not work, and then dissect it. This is what I managed to do with Linux, taking it to its extremes, and figuring out the limits of what I want to achieve.

These lessons were gained during my time using Linux.

• Ubuntu from 12.04 to 25.04 with many different DEs (Desktop Environments), because there was always a new one that seemed better. One that I keep coming back to is KDE which has made it a staple if I need to choose a UI for Linux.
• Linux Mint 17, 18 and 19 - It is designed to work 'out of the box' and comes fully equipped with the apps most people want, which doesn’t fit my adventurous desires and expectations from Linux.
• Arch Linux (and Kali Linux)—We all go through the h4xx0r period, when we learn that Kali Linux exists and install it because we get excited to be "the Bad Guy." Then it turns out that Kali itself is not special, and to use the tools, you need to learn a lot... and that's where the excitement tends to die.
• Manjaro - Best of both worlds. When I don't specifically need the extensive support of Ubuntu, I prefer Manjaro. From my experience, it has felt more stable, more up-to-date and more performant. The main issue I encountered is some game-related library support, but it is not an issue when you install Manjaro on your work computer (obviously with KDE, as I mentioned earlier).

With this, you can see the extent of my adventurousness when it comes to Linux. This also extends to trying out new tools and apps, but there is only so much you can do with pre-packaged and pre-built products.

More details on how this exact blog is self-hosted in the 2nd part, and maybe eventually you will choose self-hosting too. To not miss the 2nd part, don’t forget to subscribe to my blog.