Hosting from home
host-from-homeI’ve been reading about the IndieWeb recently and a lot of the principles resonate with me, for example:
- own your data
- scratch your own itch
- use what you make
But I haven’t been following these principles in my own online life. My data is locked into other providers, such as Gmail, Twitter, and Facebook. In the (unlikely?) event that one of the services stopped operating, what would happen to my data? Would I be able to get it out, or transfer it to another provider? What if a provider enacts a policy I disagree with? What if they sell my data?
So, I’m making a change. I’m making a concerted effort to take back my data and own my content, starting with this blog. At time of writing, this blog is hosted on a Raspberry Pi in my home.
How? #
The basics are pretty straightforward:
- run a web server on the pi to serve content
- set up a virtual server in your cloud of choice to get a static ip address
- connect the two via a VPN
- reverse-proxy requests to the cloud server back to the pi
- add a CDN to distribute content and reduce load on the server
Easy-peasy, right?
To make this set up relatively performant, I did make some specific design choices. The entire site is static html - no dynamic content at all. And I decided not to have comments (for now).
Conclusion #
This endeavor turned out to be a little more difficult than I initially thought. If you’re interested in doing something like this yourself, I’ll be documenting exactly how I set this up and the issues I ran into over the coming weeks.