Web- and Self-Hosting Cheatsheet
This is a collection of techniques for web- and self-hosting that I personally find painless and dependable.
The inspiration for making this cheatsheet came partially from Trafotin’s video It’s Impossible to Self Host Anything “Correctly”, which immediately made me think “huh? it ain’t supposed to be that hard”. After a bit of deliberation I decided that maybe I should share the “arcane hosting knowledge” I have accumulated, instead of just sitting on it thinking “everyone should know this, this is basic stuff”.
Updates or support regarding this collection of guides is not guaranteed, but if you hit me up on social media or email I might gently respond after a variable amount of time. I can point you in the right direction, but I won’t (or at least shouldn’t) hold your hand all the way. If you need someone to do that, or to just set up your hosting for you, you can just pay me for that you know.
Table of Contents
Prerequisites
Okay, maybe you could get by without these, but I really really recommend not skipping these
You should own a domain name
Your domain is not only your identity on the internet, it can also be your server’s identity. If you don’t own a domain name that you control, there’s no guarantees that your stuff will be found in the same URL in the future.
That control aspect is important. If you use a free domain or subdomain, you are up to the mercy of the organization loaning you their domain to stay around and keep you around, eventhough you do not generate revenue for them. I would also recommend against ccTLDs of countries you don’t live in, because that requires putting trust in a foreign government that might stop existing or change their laws regarding domain name leasing. (I know I know, .io and .ai are hot shit, but there are so many cool gTLDs out there as well)
Depending on the TLD you choose, a domain name runs at about $10-$30 per year, though some more premium TLDs can cost upwards of $100 per year. A cheap domain name is probably not a huge investment for most nerds reading this.
I’m a happy customer of Porkbun (not sponsored), and I use Cloudflare for DNS management (not sponsored). I’ve read good things about Porkbun and they have a pretty good user experience. Cloudflare is a great place to manage your DNS if you are also interested in using Cloudflare as a proxy, Cloudflare Tunnels as a secure firewall-bypassing reverse proxy, or Cloudflare Workers as a place to host a website or web app for free.
Cloudflare…
“CloudFlare is a very helpful service if you are a website owner and don’t want to deal with separate services for CDN, DNS, basic DDOS protection and other (superficial) security needs. You can have all these services in a one-stop-shop and you can have it all for free. It’s hard to pass up the offer and go for a commercial solution”
- citation from CloudFlare is ruining the internet (for me) by Slashgeek
Yes, that glowing review of a citation is really from an article with “Cloudflare is ruining the internet” in the title. And that article is not alone. The internet if full of articles containing friendly and less friendly criticism of Cloudflare and its monopoly-like position as a frontdoor to the internet (I’m sure you can find more on Hacker News next time they have an outage). The user interface of their dashboard is cluttered and slow and generally sucks ass (in my opinion).
I am not proud of being a Cloudflare user.
Nevertheless, this guide, for the time being, will talk of and recommend many Cloudflare services. Because it’s a great product for the price its low low price of free, and there is a lot of ecosystem and support around it.
If you think there is a free replacement that is better than some service provided by Cloudflare, please please let me know.
Taking advantage of big tech
No SysAdmin needed
Hosting a website for free
Sometimes a server or VPS of your own is overkill if you’re planning to just put the site behind a proxy anyways to block DDOS attacks and AI scrapers.