Hardcore IndieWeb: Run your own website 100% independently for only $0.01/day

https://www.neatnik.net/hardcore-indieweb

by cdrnsf • 4 days ago

258 202 4 days ago

neatnik.net

variety8675• 4 days ago

It is nice to see a site preaching this that isn't hosted by Cloudflare or GitHub Pages

konsalexee• 4 days ago

Or even Vercel/Netlify

Cider9986• 4 days ago

I appreciate Cloudflare for keeping all the piracy sites running, though.

odie5533• 4 days ago

Github Pages is free hosting with domains and ssl, no bills, and has good longevity and prospects. I don't want to worry or think about a static site, and big players like Github and Cloudflare seem to fit that best.

codazoda3• 4 days ago

What’s your preference?

I also “preach” GitHub pages a lot but I’ve also written about hosting on a Raspberry Pi in my bedroom.

https://joeldare.com/private-analytics-and-my-raspberry-pi-4...

inigyou22• 3 days ago

Literally anything that isn't big tech.

Small tech is fine. Self hosting is fine. VPSes are fine. Don't use "clouds" - they're big tech, and overpriced.

Make sure it's something you pay for, so that you are the customer, instead of the product.

superkuh2• 4 days ago

It's good advice, but one need not even include the "upload it to a web server" these days now that home connections are so fast. Install some static webserver on your desktop computer (nginx, caddy, whatever), forward the port 80 at your router to it's lanip:80, and just save .html and files to the web directory using your normal desktop interface. It doesn't matter if you shut off the computer sometimes. Uptime doesn't matter. Optionally file transfer (rsync, etc) this local copy to a VPS or something like the author suggests.

Indieweb receiving of webmention only requires the ability to log HTTP POSTs to some url endpoint. Or you can use one of third party services servers to receive that interact with your website via with 3rd party javascript applications you include on your webpage. Sending webmention can be done with cURL, even HTML forms, or again, 3rd party JS includes.

Jabrov• 4 days ago

You need a static IP address for this to work is the downside, and depending on where you live and who your provider it it can be difficult and/or expensive.

erikw• 4 days ago

You can programmatically update DNS whenever your dynamic IP changes. One issue though is that some residential ISPs prohibit webhosting in their terms.

tancop• 4 days ago

you can go ipv6 only, any good isp will give you a static /56 for free. practically none of your users have ipv4 only devices when every major os has been dual stack by default for like 15 years. if your isp cant give you one its time to switch as soon as you can.

bayindirh5• 4 days ago

However, it'll also bring all the bots and "wild west" of the internet to your house when you run your web server from home, and for anyone who has a couple of spare dollars, it's a much wiser choice to run a small VPS elsewhere to weather the storm.

neogodless• 4 days ago

shrug

In 25 years of hosting a dozen domain names on a server on my home connection, this problem has not surfaced for me.

bblb3• 4 days ago

[Internet facing router with up to date firmware] --> HTTPS --> [separate VLAN DMZ] --> [my hardcore IndieWeb VM/k8s/bare-metal whatever] --> [x No outbound access / paranoid local firewall inside the VM x]

[My home computer] --> SSH --> [my hardcore IndieWeb local cloud]

That's about it. Safe enough.

tamimio3• 4 days ago

Well this is great, even going further and hosting the site itself and serve it instead of webhosts, but, now we have domains issue, a domain registrar hijacking your domain, which is your life work, email, etc., so there’s a need to have a free tld that’s uncontrollable by any entity, .onion isn’t practical obviously.

wizzwizz42• 4 days ago

There's no such thing as a TLD that's uncontrollable by any entity. How would you imagine such a thing working? Whatever you imagine: how does it stand up to me editing the hosts file, or the browser's source code?

charcircuit4• 4 days ago

There's no such thing as a TLD that's uncontrollable by any entity.

Think .crypto but without the ability to upgrade the smart contract to censor domains. The registry is spread out across a whole decentralized network of computers of which has another decentralized network of computers that proxy requests exists.

how does it stand up to me editing the hosts file, or the browser's source code?

No one can force you to resolve domains YOU don't want to. You can of course blow up your computer and then you definitely can't resolve the domain. What people mean is that the user is free to still resolve it if they want.

busymom03• 4 days ago

I self host my site [1] on an old Mac mini in a Swift backend and sqlite database. Only thing I rely upon someone for is Cloudflare tunnels for free. I could replace that with port forwarding but so far, this way is pretty good.

[1] https://limereader.com/

tamimio3• 4 days ago

Cloudflare tunnels for free. I could replace that with port forwarding

You could replace it with something better, like pangolin, either their cloud or even self host it too, and that way you can tunnel to other stuff like if you have a media server where you can watch your movies from anywhere in the world.

wolvoleo6• 4 days ago

Yeah I find it a bit funny when people self host to get away from cloud and then use Cloudflare tunnels.

bartlebone2• 4 days ago

Cloudflare tunnels are pretty cool. Do you segregate your server from your home domain too? Little weird having cloudflared on my home network. It make things a little more annoying but I haven’t bothered to fix it since I dev on the same production server.

busymom03• 4 days ago

My server is a different computer which only does this. It's not on my personal computer.

segmondy• 4 days ago

same here, except a 5 yrs old raspberry pi hanging off a power adapter on the floor.

doawoo• 4 days ago

Yup, I have a similar setup where I use a Wireguard VPN to tunnel traffic to a tiny public facing Caddy server, which proxies the traffic to the server under my own roof. No Cloudflare!

onetrickwolf• 4 days ago

I have something similar. I use Cloudflare tunnels too but also their CDN which is free (for now).

That's the only thing I haven't really been able to figure out how to do on my own. Back in the day, hosting a static site from my crappy DSL connection was basically no problem and most people who were accessing my site were probably in my timezone. Now with how big the web is and how many bots there are, I worry about the quality of self hosting without a CDN.

inigyou22• 3 days ago

Bots are over-fearmongered. Yes, you get a lot of bot traffic to any website. No, it isn't a ddos unless you make it a ddos by making your server do 10 seconds of computation on every page load. Just keep an eye on server load so you know when a solution is actually needed, and you'll be fine. Install Anubis if you want to, but there are even simpler checks, like requiring an image or CSS file to be loaded or setting a cookie or putting a simple redirect in JavaScript or meta-refresh.

jdjdjdjdjd• 4 days ago

Kind of funny that this is like some strange new concept... Having a web server and putting your stuff on it.

bayindirh5• 4 days ago

Considering many people doesn't know what a file is, keeping the spirit alive is important, I think.

al_borland• 4 days ago

The lack of basic computer knowledge I’ve seen from developers is terrifying.

shermantanktop2• 4 days ago

I encountered juniors straight out of school who don’t know what tar is, or rsync, or what a symlink is.

It’s all learnable and everyone starts somewhere. But you’d think natural curiosity would kick in and they’d have picked up some of this on their own by the time they have a job.

tadasv2• 4 days ago

This will get worse with new generations. They grow up on tables and phones where file system is a completely foreign concept. You need an app for everything.

mr_toad2• 3 days ago

Considering many people doesn't know what a file is, keeping the spirit alive is important, I think.

Files aren’t sacred. It’s actually troubling that many technical people never consider alternatives. Most of the worlds data today is probably not stored in filesystems, rather in databases and object stores that use custom storage backends.

bigbuppo• 4 days ago

Oh, wait until the kids learn about hardware.

bblb3• 4 days ago

The article was a lot of words just to say that.

It's sad that we need this new concept of "IndieWeb", as the whole Internet evolved into a monstrosity hosted and guardrailed by a handful of megacorporations. Hosting files became a privilege, when it should've been a (human) right all along.

edit: The tech to host yourself is obviously still there, but the _mindset_ changed to cloud only.

kay_o• 4 days ago

edit: The tech to host yourself is obviously still there, but the _mindset_ changed to cloud only.

Sadly with CGNAT, port blocks, hosting any server being a terms of service violation...

dizhn• 4 days ago

We are a long removed from when putting something in your public_html folder would instantly give you a personal web site. Not that I am saying people should still hand write html or anything but it was a very quick and natural way to participate back in the day. (A unix account usually gave you automatic p2p chat too using finger to see if your buddy was online and talk/ytalk to talk to them.) This was little less than magic at the time even when your friend was sitting on the terminal right next to you.

bartlebone2• 4 days ago

This article is a great example for anyone in their 50’s who is worried about not having relevant skills anymore.

Although calling it hardcore makes it sound like porn. Too bad they had to add that term for something painfully not hardcore.

ivanjermakov• 4 days ago

run 100% independently
For just $0.01/day, you can run a static website at NearlyFreeSpeech.net

I respect the spotlight on hosting your own websites, but it's not much different from the usual Vercel/Netlify/GitHub/Cloudflare static hosting.

What if I want a database, feedback form, social media previews, good SEO? Article says nothing about it. Perhaps that's what makes a website "indie"?

IanCal• 4 days ago

You have access to php and a database there.

3eb7988a1663• 4 days ago

I get your point, but I still remember that guy who got a $100k Netlify bill for his free plan.

xigoi2• 4 days ago

NFS supports dynamic websites (giving you access to a full Linux system with many programming languages), though you’ll have to pay more.

inigyou22• 3 days ago

If NFS isn't much difference from Vercel we should see 50% of people using Vercel and 50% using NFS, but we don't, they're all on Vercel - why?

_def• 4 days ago

now the real fun part is how to self-host it on a machine accessible on the net without services like cloudflare or tailscale tunnels.

wolvoleo6• 4 days ago

It used to be as simple as getting a fixed IP but these days that is indeed a lot harder to get.

tadasv2• 4 days ago

Fixed IP would be a way to go. Some people pick dynamic dns server so they can periodically update if their IP changes. But IMO it's just too complicated. I don't think there's a good way to go around ISP restrictions, especially in USA.

I host my site on my own home server, but I do have a proxy ec2 server to tunnel public traffic via wireguard back to my home server. This keeps things a bit more protected and my router/home network not directly exposed. I'm also not locked into AWS, I just use them for convenience, but could get any other cheap proxy to run wireguard. No dependency on tailscale either, it's just nicer interface to wireguard. Wireguard config is like 5 lines btw.

lorenzowood• 3 days ago

+1 I use Oracle Cloud rather than AWS as their "always free" tier is plenty to run a reverse proxy. As you say, could be anywhere.

raytopia2• 4 days ago

You can do it over TOR.

RustySwarf• 4 days ago

I arrived at a pretty similar system starting from similar goals.

https://rustyswarf.com, which runs on a very simple framework called Travail.

In practice, I found cloudflare necessary to deter bots/crawlers. It is indeed fairly cheap, but you're still dependent upon three entities you don't really control: the DNS, the host, and Cloudflare.

inigyou22• 3 days ago

You don't need to deter bots and crawlers. Cloudflare wants you to think you do.

pagoto• 4 days ago

Recently, I had to make a website for an event, so domain was needed, but what's cool with that is that the domain provider (Infomaniak, with which I am not affiliated btw), also provided 10 MB of storage which is large enough for a lot of things. So for something like 5€ per year (still more than 1c per day...), you can get the domain and the website, which is not too bad

qudat• 4 days ago

Very cool! I run a set of ssh-based services over at https://pico.sh and love seeing all the indie web content on HN!

Sftp is still very useful even in 2026

raytopia2• 4 days ago

Nearlyfreespeech is a great service though not a 100% independent as your still relying on them. I think the closest you can get to 100% independent without running your own internet infrastructure is either port forwarding from your home (if allowed) or hosting a website through TOR which isn't too hard. You just have to download the browser and edit a config file (torrc) with the port you want on the network. Not ideal of course though because anyone who wants to visit your website will need the tor browser and explaining to people that your website is on the "dark web" is a little hard to do.

I am a little surprised that doing so isn't more popular on in the indie web scene though as you do it on hardware you own, from your home, and the tor network protects people from knowing your servers ip address if that's something you care about. You could even go to your domain provider and have one of your domains redirect to your .onion address so people don't need to memorize it.

There also used to be the beaker browser which let you create and host your own website directly from the browser but that project got shut down. Hopefully something similar will show up at some point. Maybe a website creating plugin for tor would be enough to make it more popular.

loloquwowndueo• 4 days ago

port forwarding from your home

Not 100% independent then. You still depend on your isp.

wpm• 4 days ago

Indeed. I also depend on my power company, the entire global supply chain to provide me with computers to purchase, copper mines for the networking cables I use, oil fields all over the globe for the plastic, etc etc etc.

QuantumNomad_2• 4 days ago

You could even go to your domain provider and have one of your domains redirect to your .onion address so people don't need to memorize it.

Apparently [1] there are also ways that Tor Browser supports, for directing visitors to the onion address via the “normal” internet:

- Onion-Location

The Onion-Location method was introduced on Tor Browser 9.5 as a way for service operators announce their Onion Services in their regular HTTPS sites. It's specified under tor-browser-spec's Proposal 100 - "Onion redirects using Onion-Location HTTP header".

- Alt-Svc

Similar to Onion-Location, the Alt-Svc method also uses an HTTP Header (the Alt-Svc Header, specified by RFC 7838), which means that the user first need to access the regular site before their browser discovers the alternate Onion Service address.
But contrary to Onion-Location, the Alt-Svc method:
- Does not support an HTML tag, as it relies entirely in the Alt-Svc Header.
- Is fully transparent: all the discovery and upgrade happens automatically, without user intervention.

- Additionally, they also speak of future possibilities for DNS or DNSSEC-based Onion Association.

[1] https://onionservices.torproject.org/research/proposals/usab...

crtasm• 3 days ago

You can see it in action by visiting e.g. https://www.qubes-os.org/ in tor browser

smalltorch6• 4 days ago

+1. Why even pay the penny? Spinning a onion service is trivial...and...more secure than the clearwebz.

I've made a few easy to spin up services. Heck, you can even run it off your phone.

Nanogram https://gitlab.com/here_forawhile/nanogram

Spreadsheet Server https://gitlab.com/here_forawhile/spreadsheet

Library Server https://gitlab.com/here_forawhile/libraryserver

Torum (HN Clone) https://gitlab.com/here_forawhile/torum

pastel87392• 4 days ago

I wonder if the fact that you linked to clear web source code links rather than onion links demonstrates why people might pay the penny…

andai2• 4 days ago

Nah, then you're still dependent on Tor. The most independent way is to publish your blog on your own p2p network ;)

fsflover2• 4 days ago

Tor is not a single point of failure: It is a p2p network.

rglullis5• 4 days ago

Perfect is enemy of the good. Like you said, the only way to be truly independent if people ran their own infrastructure, and if all the hardware was as 100% FOSS.

Of all the compromises we have to do (relying on Telco providers, equipment manufacurers, etc), using Nearlyfreespeech is the less risky one. They have no history of abusing the trust users have placed on them, and service costs virtually nothing.

inigyou22• 3 days ago

The internet isn't even capable of handling 8 billion people each with their own infrastructure. Even if everyone got IPv6 and their own PI address block, most DFZ routers can't handle that many routing table entries. Pooling resources is mandatory for the internet to work. However, there needs to be (and are) plenty of choices of who to pool with, so that you can find a trustworthy one.

Krei-se• 3 days ago

i host myself with 2 fixed IPs from telekom germany business, its not as expensive as one might expect, under 90€ for a fiber and vdsl line, so next to hosting your own auth ns servers and mail you get failover at home which is nice.

inigyou22• 3 days ago

Deutsche Telekom is well known as one of the worst ISPs due to their peering policy. Basically all traffic in or out of DT to/from another ISP is either paid by that ISP at extortionate rates, or takes circuitous routes to avoid paying extortionate rates. For this reason I believe they should be boycotted.

This is a common pattern for ex-national carriers in many countries btw - they believe they should be paid by both sides for all traffic that traverses their network, not just by one side, because they feel like they are God of the Internet in that country.

miki1232112• 3 days ago

With port forwarding, somebody else still owns the identifier that points to your website, whether that's a domain name or an IP address.

iamnothere• 3 days ago

Note: you don’t need to “download the browser” to use Tor. Tor is a service, not a browser. The “Tor Browser” bundles a privacy-friendly browser with the Tor service, for your convenience. You can run a Tor site on your headless server without installing any browser at all.

pibaker• 3 days ago

Few people host their websites as hidden services because it's just asking too much from anyone who uses your site.

Imagine you are in a conversation with a stranger. You want to show him your personal website. Consider the following two sentences. Which has the highest probability of actually helping him getting on your website?

"Go to myfirstnamelastname.com. Yeah, it's spelled with a K."

"Go to $FIFTYSIXRANDOMCHRACTERS.onion. Oh you need to use the onion browser. Let me help you install it on your phone. Can't find the service? Oh my bad it's actually $FIFTYSIXRANDOMCHARACTERS.onion. There you go."

assimpleaspossi5• 4 days ago

I don't get it. I've been doing this for over 20 years exactly the same way. I even ran a business. The server I rent is $2/month. I read nothing new in anything in that article.

I don't get it.

codazoda3• 4 days ago

I see a lot of young software engineers who don’t realize how much you can do on your own and how simple it is.

dev_tty01• 4 days ago

You are clearly not the target audience. Perhaps you can recognize that other more recent internet frequenters might appreciate the knowledge.

assimpleaspossi5• 3 days ago

To me this "knowledge" seems to be a crutch. Real knowledge would show how to do it on their own as thousands of us have done for decades and still do today.

nosrepa• 4 days ago

I opened this up thinking the same thing using NFS, and lo and behold that's what the author used.

ungreased0675• 4 days ago

Azure has a free tier that is fairly generous.

bblb3• 4 days ago

Also the Always Free Oracle Cloud tier is pretty generous. You can spin up a VM or two with it.

codazoda3• 4 days ago

I created Neat CSS for some Hardcore IndieWeb users (though I’ve never used that name before now).

https://neat.joeldare.com

You’ll also find a free email course where I walk you through how I create a site using it. Link on that page.

est• 4 days ago

Self-plug here.

I built a comment js plugin which hosts all data inside a git repo. https://github.com/est/req4cmt (as long as your git service accept http)

It runs a Cloudflare Worker for free. The data backup/migration is basically git clone & push

There's another twitter-replacement, also based on git. https://github.com/est/gitweets

Demo https://f.est.im/ it supports comments via git notes :D

$0.01/day ? They are all completely free thanks to Cloudflare Workers / Github Pages.

bryanhogan• 4 days ago

I'm building an Astro starter template that also makes it easy to start your own website / blog: https://github.com/BryanHogan/astro-starter-template

Astro is a framework that uses no JavaScript by default. I also use just HTML and CSS, so no bloated additional frameworks or styling libraries.

All blog content is written as Markdown or .mdx files, so it's easy to write and move to any other tool if you wish to do so.

You can host it for free using any major provider since it's just a static website (e.g., GitHub Pages, Cloudflare, etc.).

Making it similar to my own website which is on: https://bryanhogan.com/

(Repo: https://github.com/BryanHogan/bryanhogan )

SilentM68• 4 days ago

Kind of similar to "tiiny.host" minus the custom domain and with a few file restrictions for the free tier but very similar.

JSR_FDED• 4 days ago

OK, if the reason to do this is to learn how HTML and web serving work, splurge and get a VPS. You’ll learn so much more.

jrm4• 4 days ago

Old guy here, wild that people don't know this.

Like, I have fiber and a static IP. Never much thought about hosting a website from my house because it didn't seem all that special. Maybe I should?

inigyou22• 3 days ago

Note that most ISPs don't allow it on residential plans, but also won't stop you unless you actually create some kind of problem (no ISP actively polices it). If you're rich you can pay more for a business plan (at your home) which would explicitly allow it.

It's fine to host something for friends on a residential ISP. They don't care. If you want to make it a public website it's more uncertain. Still don't worry though, because they won't just ban you from the internet. Worst you'd get is a phone call telling you to stop it.

Brajeshwar• 4 days ago

Personal, but I’d rather learn and own a process.

1. Learn how you can get HTML generated from a human-readable and writer-friendly format, say, Markdown (plain-text). This can be Pandoc, a macOS/Win wrapper desktop UI over Pandoc, and many other tools that do this.

2. Learn the process (and the tools) to upload, or sync to a service that hosts the HTML (CSS+JS).

3. Learn the simple steps of owning of a domain, and updating the DNS to point to the right services, such as Github Pages, CloudFlare Pages, etc.

As you are not dependent on a particular tool/service/platform/company, you can walk out and host your files (the website content) elsewhere.

The post-processing of the raw (Markdown) articles/posts to HTML can be then automated with Static Site Generator if someone is willing to learn a little more on top of the above steps.

Of course, it is a fun and good thing to know HTML but that should be optional to the target of “Run your own website 100% independently.” With Github and Cloudfalre, you can hve it for $0 monthly. If they go kaput or stops free, someone will come up - walk out and walk in elsewhere.

xigoi2• 4 days ago

From the article:

When your posts are individual HTML files (not Markdown files or database entries), they can finally be seen as the individual web pages that they truly are. And that means that you can really lean into making all of your posts unique! They don’t all have to be cookie-cutter paper-doll clones of one another; that’s just a bi-product of modern web publishing tools and the cultural influence that they have on our concept of a “blog”. You can now go ahead and make every blog post as special and individual as you’d like. Each post can have its own personality, baked right into its HTML. Individual style, individual appearance, even individual layout. Literally everything is possible with this approach.

krapp• 4 days ago

I have to push against this slightly.

HTML is human-readable and writer friendly. Humans - not even all of them CS students - were reading HTML,JS and CSS on websites and writing it all by hand in text editors for years before the "proper tooling" came along. It really isn't that difficult, especially if you're just dealing with simple websites, doubly so if you're on HN, you probably work with more complex languages on a regular basis.

If you really want to "learn and own a process" and be "100% independent" you should at least be able to understand and work with web languages natively.

Static site generators are nice (I use Nikola) and tools make things easier but but it's still dependency on third party tools if you don't understand or can't otherwise work with the output.

salamo• 4 days ago

I come at it from a slightly different angle.

I write technical blog posts with visualizations and live demos. That usually means embedding a bit of custom javascript in the page for the demo. Or shipping custom wasm to enable extreme semantic model compression.

I do this by pushing content from my machine to github pages which is wired up to my subdomain.

If github pages stops being a good, free option for this, I will find another. Not sure I would call this "hardcore" really.

57016524006• 4 days ago

you still need domain and static IP with this setup. and volumetric DDoS protection, ASN IP blocklists, and CDN — is not even mentioned here.

just use Cloudflare. get all this for free (except domain).

sim04ful• 4 days ago

The cost doesn't really matter as much as the payment methods, especially at that price point.

Payment methods are inherently discriminatory.

Illniyar• 4 days ago

This is a pretty weird article/movement. The greatest hurdle is almost definitely a domain name, which if you want to own the content you have to get. Which even the cheapest would cost you around 6$ a year. (I'm ignoring the "tk" tld, which is kind of a honeypot)

And you can host for a static site for free in a million places. CDNs free tiers are enough for individuals.

I don't get the preoccupation with hosting your own server, what matters is that you own your own identifier (in this case a domain name) whatever it points is vastly less important.

cowboy_henk• 4 days ago

6USD per year adds about 0.016USD per day. Definitely more, still pretty cheap.

hvb23• 4 days ago

I don't get the preoccupation with hosting your own server

The field of software engineering is dominated by the smart people that do something not because they have to but out of curiosity.

I've hired a bunch of people and I was always looking for curiosity and drive most of all. A degree doesn't help you if you don't care.

latexr2• 4 days ago

The field of software engineering is dominated by the smart people that do something not because they have to but out of curiosity.

Emphasis mine.

We wish. I think the state of tech pretty conclusively demonstrates those people aren’t the ones who dominate. Money and power hungry tech bros do, which is why everything is shit and exploitative.

TheOtherHobbes• 3 days ago

There's negative curiosity involved in trying to reinvent the mid-90s web, but worse.

It's tragic that "your own domain and your own hand-written HTML" has somehow become a glorious ideal, and not a catastrophic failure of the modern imagination.

No one who is truly content-first and not tech-first is remotely (ha...) interested in any of this.

What content-first people want is a drop-in one-click package that sets up a server, secures it and keeps it secure, and installs something like Wordpress, but federated.

And is generally simpler, easier to set up, easier to use, and better.

And prettier.

(Email would be nice too, but we can't have nice things since the oligopolists locked that down with "spam filtering" of itty bitty private domains.)

Pick from a few themes, post, read, interact, leave the customisation and under-the-hood features until later, if you get around to it all.

That's it. That's a what will create a true content-first indienet.

Anything else is just FOSS tinkering for the sake of tinkering, not a credible attempt to create an open platform.

filleduchaos• 4 days ago

What part of this pretty weird article proposed hosting your own server?

nathias• 4 days ago

I'm just paying for the domain...

2b3a51• 4 days ago

Just a call out for sdf.org.

Perhaps useful for those training developers mentioned in some posts here who need the TIL experience with unix based systems. Free shell account on a netbsd unix, and I recollect that a small one-off donation provides access to Web space and other enhancements. Choose the login name wisely as that becomes the subdomain for the Web space.

57016524006• 4 days ago

this would work if we had free DNS. solving DNS to be trully decentralized and free is something for years I wish I had more time to work on and build

key properties:

1. everyone can be a registar. your localhost too

2. blockchain proof of ownership and discovery (certs, not proof-of-work, fast and cheap ledger)

3. everyone can be a CA (self-signed certs pinned in blockchain)

4. no fixation on static IPs (inspired by Cloudflare Tunnels, Tailscale). IPs are ephemeral.

5. blockchain/P2P discovery of domains

but it is all fantasy without real browsers support (Chrome, Safari). 99.999% of traffic is locked there, and both controlled by monopolies Google / Apple. and you cannot even build your own browser (Apple App Store will not allow it). Maybe alternative stores and some proxies / translation layer from normal web to this web would help.

bunbun69• 4 days ago

You can’t build your own engine outside of the EU, but you can still build on top of the existing Safari engine. What you’re describing is technically possible.

However, why would a company build something just for a handful of people?

57016524006• 4 days ago

exactly.

57016524006• 4 days ago

if it was up to corporate monopolies (MSFT, Google, Apple) they would shut down whole web and remove other browsers from OS they control, and be gatekeepers of entire internet unless govenrment threaten them break them up or block them.. oh wait.

57016524006• 4 days ago

so the only way to make this happen is independent SWEs build their own browser. AND significant portion of users will start use it exclusively AND it survives and crashes competition from OS controlled browsers (Chrome/Safari) AND OS does not block/remove them from OS controlled app stores (which they can and regularly do, just look at "Hey" or "Brave").

you got to go full own hardware stack. now only China can reallistically pull this off.

China has own hardward stack. (actually entirety of all hardware stacks. it is all build there). China has own playstores or higly regulated versions of Apple/Google play stores.

China has mini-apps ecosystem which is more resilient to App Store whims.

and pretty much China is only place that can reallistically negotiate and push back to Google/Apple.

nobody else can stand a chance.

so free web is only possible in China pretty much. and future of free web is there.

57016524006• 4 days ago

I guess if you are Epic games, and you do not want to be blocked or controlled by App Stores, or pay 30% paycut. maybe you would build and support independent (from google/apple monopoly) interenet stack.

or if you are EU/China and do not want google DNS and networkign layer owning entire EU/China

in all cases they would still want centralized control by each state/company.

how to align incentives of someone who can actually pull this off and still keep it decentralized is a big question.

inigyou22• 3 days ago

Zooko's Triangle says you can't build a name resolution system that's secure, human readable, and decentralised.

DNS is secure (in Zooko's terms - means you can be certain a domain only has one correct resolution) and human readable.

.onion is secure and decentralised.

Petnames (as in I2P) or /etc/hosts are human readable and decentralised.

Also any centralised secure system will quickly have all the names squatted if they are free. It's bad enough at current prices. For instance every dictionary word under .com is already taken. If they cost nothing it would be every pronounceable sequence of up to 12 letters.

Nothing is actually stopping you running "weird DNS" on your home network if you implement the DNS protocol towards clients. I suggest you get familiar with the program Unbound. It's very common for networks to use alternative DNS if only to address the devices on the network.

Also IPs weren't originally meant to be ephemeral. You can get an address block registered to you (v6 only of course, there's no more v4) for a pretty reasonable nominal fee.

mattlondon• 4 days ago

Personally I have used GitHub pages and cloudflare pages for hosting static sites and have been very happy with them considering the zero cost involved.

I don't think there is much difference between paying nearlyfreespeech (which I have done in the past) Vs using GitHub or cloudflare - you are still reliant on a third party for actual hosting. I don't really see any value in self-hosting myself - apart from nerdy satisfaction etc, I don't see the need.

The important part in my mind is the fact that I am manually controlling the assets - the HTML the images etc. Simple files on disk.

The git integration with GitHub and cloudflare though is obviously a huge boon though as now I have an off-site backup, and publishing is even more seamless than the old FTP/sftp days - just push to master from within vscode where you are editing the files anyway and it'll be live in 30 seconds (as well as backed up).

pards• 3 days ago

Same, but with GitLab pages.

inigyou22• 3 days ago

When you pay for something, you stop being the product and become the customer instead. That's a big deal.

bluedragon1221• 3 days ago

I've never understood this mentality. Why can't they still sell your data after you pay them? Porque no los dos?

blfr• 3 days ago

Not really, not for 1¢/day. Most massive platforms that I use for free (Google Workspace, Cloudflare Pages, even Oracle Cloud always free tier) have outlived many low cost solutions I tried.

Nux• 3 days ago

It used to be the case in the past, perhaps, but not now.

Now you just get fscked twice.

yokto• 3 days ago

However, not paying does not mean that you necessarily become "the product".

Offering loss-leading products is a common business strategy and I'm perfectly okay taking advantage of this for hosting needs that fit a vendor's free tier.

Static hosting is very cheap to offer and gathering free tier users will gain developer mind-share, which helps the vendor can sell their truly money-making products. To pick a clear-cut example: AWS Lambda does not collect any additional data on free tier usage compared to paid usage.

gigatexal• 3 days ago

I do the same for my blog [1]

[1] https://gigatexal.blog

miki1232112• 3 days ago

A huge advantage of GH / CF is that your site has a strong chance of outliving you, if that's something you care about.

If you're self hosting, either at home or on a VPS, you have to worry about domains expiring and credit cards being cancelled, which is inevitably going to happen if you don't have a succession plan in place. You could probably solve it with a bunch of lawyering, but that's expensive.

Free services don't have this problem. They can still go away, it's not a 100% guarantee, but it's a "might" versus a "definitely will"

abdullahkhalids• 3 days ago

How many free hosts from 20 years are still alive? Not many.

tasoeur• 4 days ago

I’ve been using xmit.co for my static websites and it works fantastic (also free but I donate to the author yearly).

chrisjj• 3 days ago

The methodology

No. That's the method.

npilk• 3 days ago

I appreciate the sentiment but can't quite tell who the author is targeting. Is it people who don't even know what HTML is, or those who are technical enough to have considered tradeoffs between web hosting options?

For complete beginners, I made https://weejur.com , which is designed to make it easy for even a complete beginner to paste in HTML and get it hosted on GitHub Pages for free. (And is also hosted itself on GitHub for free!)

feelamee• 3 days ago

oh yeah, how my opinion changing: - in schools I used HTML+CSS to make my own site during homework - after that I understand that no one truly create sites this way. You need JS, framework, database, etc, etc - now I returned back - I really need only my text editor and HTML+CSS

Holy, I love this simplicity

znpy• 3 days ago

Weird to see the author spending 0.01 on their website and $99+tax on the text editor.

Hardcore IndieWeb: Run your own website 100% independently for only $0.01/day

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