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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
38 comments
[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 22.6 ms ] threadIndieweb 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.
[1] https://limereader.com/
Although calling it hardcore makes it sound like porn. Too bad they had to add that term for something painfully not hardcore.
> 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"?
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.
Sftp is still very useful even in 2026
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.
I don't get it.
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.
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.
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 )
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?
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.
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.
just use Cloudflare. get all this for free (except domain).