Maintaining your personal website sounds fun, but running your own machines in the real-world incurs in a lot of risks and ultimately costs.

A multi-tenant hosting service is the only reasonable way of hosting personal sites, it's an efficient use of an already running file server, and you get SREs for free.

Other alternatives,

• A raspberry pi sitting at home has many flaws:

  • I don't trust neither my ISP nor my power company to be up 24/7. Both have many outages a year and they rarely last less than an hour.

  • I don't want my IP to be exposed.

  • It can't scale-out.

    • https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42750420

    • https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42757154

• While VMs on shared machines are also multi-tenant, it incurs in lots of overhead for the little extra control it gives.

Instead Xe Iaso's post about being attacked by crawlers for hallucinating models

I initially used a static site generation tool

HTMX's motivation ends with a pretty strong point in my mind.

• Why should only <a> & <form> be able to make HTTP requests?

• Why should only click & submit events trigger them?

• Why should only GET & POST methods be available?

• Why should you only be able to replace the entire screen?

By removing these constraints, HTMX completes HTML as a hypertext

• I get to customise the page to my own liking

• Since I own the site generator I can establish structure that simplifies things and I'm also free to retract from ideas that seemed ok at first.

• Browsers get a jump scare on every deep link as we rely on the 404 page to route to the root page, and then JS to reconstruct the app state.

  • We could add tiny redirect pages to avoid showing a redirecting 404 to the browser.

  • These errors may break crawlers, but I'm ok leaving out hallucination machines.

• History is broken. This is my fault, but haven't spent time debugging this.

• No free theming that any decent static website generator would build for me

• Javascript is required.

  • Bummer, but transmitting ready-to-swap HTML fragments requires this. It'd be cool to have a web like HTML+HTMX-JS, but it is what it is.