How much does it matter in practice ? If you personally decide to host your own blog from your house, nobody will probably come after you.
If you get enough traction, you’ll need to host a whole operation that can be managed by a full staff and serve millions of views every day. There’s now in the picture one or more platform providers, and payment processing that you depend on for your income.
A bunch of entities are now allowing you to have your soapbox, that can be swept away at any turn if you’re too much of a problem for any of them. No need to arrest you or kidnap you, “violate your rights”, they just cut your supplies.
> I can already host my own blog and have it safe from the whims of a central service.
Depends which central service. You aren't beholden to social media companies at that point, but you still have to:
* play by the rules of your ISP (If you're hosting on your home connection)
* trust that your hosting service won't arbitrarily turf you out
* make sure that your domain is safe from unauthorized transfers, sudden price increases, etc.
If the convenience and ease-of-use of current systems is worth those downsides (And for many, it is!) then fine. But it's not entirely accurate to say that you're safe from any central service.
To your second point, legality shouldn't be the final word. There are lots of governments with laws that are either actively or inadvertently used to silence dissenting opinions, or used to root out various undesirables. "You can do crime easier using it" isn't a great argument IMO.
The question is what does it really mean to have 'your own platform'? Does it mean that you need to have your own server at your bedroom? Or is it enough to rent one at a server room, or a shared host or maybe just rent some web space? What with your internet connectivity? Or just electicity - do you need to generate your own? You always depend on someone and in theory that someone can take your blog down.
I think the reasonable answer is that you need to pay for all your needs and not rely on any free services. Then you can rely on your providers.
If you don't mind me asking, how do you have your own infrastructure configured?
I just recently set up my own blog on a DO droplet, which is fairly vendor-portable if I need to change cloud providers. I had always assumed that serving content over a non-commercial connection would have some issues, although this was more of a vague doubt in the back of my mind.
Do you worry about having greater exposure to (possibly malicious) outside traffic on your home network? Does your private ISP plan provide enough resources for hosting content?
This will probably not be something you want to hear, but this is EXACTLY why you should host your own blog on your own server. No threat from someone potentially shutting it down for no reason.
The question is what is your platform? Does it require running your own server in your bedroom, hiring a virtual machine, or maybe even anything like hosted WordPress counts as yours, because you pay for it directly? And you know even if you run your own bedroom server - even then you still rely on some companies, be it your internet provider or even electricity provider, and theoretically you can be switched off if you offend them enough. This is a complex world.
Not the OP: My personal and business blog is on a cheap host but my product is on linode.
I do this for two reasons:
#1 - I don't want my blog to have anything to do with my service. I don't want it near my service. I don't want some WP-0-Day-Exploit to impact my application stack.
#2 - It is cheap and easy. At least it was when I started it five years go. If I could do it again I'd just use github for blogging/announcements like this. I could pay to manage this myself on another linode vps, but really, for 99.9% of the time it just doesn't matter.
With that said, if I was ever to post to HN about my business I'd probably cache the announcement on its own server (just raw html) and have all other links to my blog still remain at -big hosting provider- since 90% will just click on the link and 10% may dig deeper into the blog itself.
Personally I don't think it's a big deal that the blog is hosted on some big provider. I'd be more concerned if the service was there as well.
If a consulting client came up to me and asked "Is it better for us to host our own blogging software on our domain inexpertly, get the SEO credit for it, and go down hard for a little while every time we hit social media, or to host on PostTumPressEr with perfect uptime?", I would say "Host yourself!" so fast it would barely be polite.
I don't mean this in an aggressive fashion: your eyeball is worth nothing.
Now, in the real world, hosted blogs do have downtime and self-hosted ones can be made nearly bulletproof by following a few simple guidelines. cough KeepAlive off cough
Thanks for this! I started the day wondering if I was going to need to waste some brain cycles finding some new hosting for my near zero traffic blog, but this response answered pretty much all of my concerns.
Any content creator takes certain risks when they choose to be a sharecropper on someone else's platform.
Websites being banned in Country X have no impact on my ability to spin up a home web server and publish whatever I want. If I reach a certain volume of users, and let the site become host to people fomenting hate or violence, there's a chance someone might look to take the site down. Depending on the type of website you run, that may be the cost of doing business.
If you think you might be a target for that kind of action, your game plan needs to have fallbacks:
- take personal cheques, gift cards or crypto instead of Patreon/Paypal/Stripe.
- Spend ~2 hours of your time learning how to setup a home server w/ a Raspberry Pi or an old laptop.
- Start transitioning your users towards the decentralized P2P web (Beaker Browser being an example)
>You avoid paying $10 every month to a hosting provider I guess, but is that what your work is worth?
Great question, I've been asked that before and here's the closest thing I can get to what I think is a fair answer:
The work? No. It may be worth less, it may be worth more to others, to me it's definitely worth more.
But
My time, on the other hand? By publishing on Medium I'm saving a lot of time I otherwise wouldn't get back from self-hosting. Let me unpack that a bit, maybe you can provide some insight because I'd like to hear some perspectives on this I hadn't previously considered.
Keep in mind, I'm a SysAdmin during the day for a company that hosts many client sites so this is a lot of stuff I do 9-5, so I really don't want to do it after 5 if I can get out of it.
Self-hosting for me means the following:
* Spinning up a DO droplet (or Linode or whatever cloud provider you pick) and all of the ancillaries like domain, email etc
* Installing and configuring the platform (I went from WordPress to Ghost, back to WordPress)
* Making sure my installation is secure, making sure my host node is secure
* Promoting posts, keeping SEO and discoverability up-to-date, keeping my shareable URLs in check, etc.
That's a lot of work to put into self-hosting-and granted a lot of this stuff is "set it and forget it"-but when my last blog got hacked twice in a row despite checking off all the best practices for WP security-I wanted to go somewhere that allowed me to do three things and do them quickly: (1) Start a site (2) Publish posts (3) Promote them as effortlessly as possible.
Medium fit the bill brilliantly. I love their editor, I like the discoverability of other writers through the community, and it's a one-stop-shop between my site and the sports site I write for.
Big wall of text, hope that answers your question, but I'm curious what you think of this take, if you're willing?
postscript: I have recently discovered and managed to get a site up and running via Jekyll+Github pages and there's a very good chance it will become my main platform, I'm still testing out a few aspects but I'm liking what I see so far.
It depends on your hosting situation, but unless you're using a hosting plan with bandwidth allotments from like 1993, you definitely don't need to worry about that. My host gives me like 2TB of bandwidth per month for $10/mo, and even with an article with several images hitting the front-page of HN for a full day, I think I used less than 1/3 of that allotment.
And unless you're doing something really... bizarre... no one is going to spend their resources to DDoS your personal blog :)
Hosting your own blog makes it vulnerable to Slashdot (and now HN, Reddit, etc.) effect. Also, a server (and even a shared hosting account) requires maintenance and monitoring to make sure you aren't serving viruses to your users. Many seasoned bloggers just want someone to take care of all this for them.
No. No project should be run out of your home. The idea has absolutely nothing to recommend it. It isn't adequate for a Wordpress blog, to say nothing of a web application your customers will be relying on.
Get yourself a VPS. They're absurdly cheap -- 3 months on Slicehost will run you $75. (I assumed you would want backups. If that was not in the cards, reevaluate your readiness to be trusted with anyone else's data.) If you have an iPhone, you have far more than $75 available if you apply yourself. If you absolutely, positively do not have $75, skip your next run out for pizza, get yourself shared hosting from GoDaddy (for about $4 a month last time I checked), and put up with the nuisances of shared hosting (which is still better than self hosting!) until you have revenue. Then, go to a VPS.
If you want to be in control, the solution has always been the same: own your own domain, and post there.
If you post on someone else's domain, then it's their content, and they're in control of it, not you. No matter what is claimed otherwise.
Yes, it's harder. Getting visibility is also harder. It's still the only solution if you want to be in control.
It's okay to pay someone to run the blogging platform, etc., as long as you own the domain name & can decide what it points to. You can then switch providers, switch systems you use, or whatever you want to do. But if you don't control the domain name, someone else is in control.
And at the very least if you don't want to pay or setup your own hosting site (and want to go the free route) at least register your own domain and have it pointed by cname or web forwarding to any of the free hosting providers out there. (Making sure to keep a backup of course).
Of course since true web hosting can be had very cheaply today (this isn't 1996) there really isn't any reason to just not setup your own site. If you are going to take the time to write something you can spend .50 per day (or less) on web hosting. What's your time worth?
That dichotomy is false, lots of levels between "self-host everything" (and deal with the pain of maintenance) and "walled gardens". For "just a blog", good old shared hosting works just as well as it did in the 90s/00s.
Maybe someone else's servers wouldn't be down when you post a link to your blog on HN.
As someone who hosts a lot of his own stuff, that's the real selling point of cloud hosting. Not having to care about things like spam filtering, or how some blog you want to publish is going to scale in the face of unexpected traffic.
If you get enough traction, you’ll need to host a whole operation that can be managed by a full staff and serve millions of views every day. There’s now in the picture one or more platform providers, and payment processing that you depend on for your income.
A bunch of entities are now allowing you to have your soapbox, that can be swept away at any turn if you’re too much of a problem for any of them. No need to arrest you or kidnap you, “violate your rights”, they just cut your supplies.
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