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.
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.
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...
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
Not 100% independent then. You still depend on your isp.
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.
So 7zip and Winrar?
I joke, but only halfway. If you're only normal Windows user, you'd never hear of anything else (unless you want to go back to Winzip, which does still exist, but I've never heard of anyone using it any more).
But here’s one I heard literally two days ago: we counted three engineers (out of many) who knew that physical memory was not actually a giant flat space of contiguous addresses, and that there were multiple layers of address-mapping and region-joining glue logic between a program and the hardware, including in os libraries, and even inside the hardware.
Maybe knowing such information is archaic or useless for most engineers. But the good ones (or at least a certain flavor of the good ones) ask questions that lead them there.
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.
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.
Payment methods are inherently discriminatory.
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.
> 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"?
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/
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...
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.
I don't get it.
Sftp is still very useful even in 2026
You’ll also find a free email course where I walk you through how I create a site using it. Link on that page.
just use Cloudflare. get all this for free (except domain).
Although calling it hardcore makes it sound like porn. Too bad they had to add that term for something painfully not hardcore.
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.
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.
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.
Ultimately, someone has to be in control of who is or is not part of that decentralized network that is the registry. (Or, alternatively phrased, how are you preventing me from saying "I'm part of the .crypto registry, totes.")
Aside from that, the root nameservers is still an entity that is controlled (by ICANN, specifically).
Ethereum is an unpermissioned network. Anyone is free to join or leave at anytime.
>how are you preventing me from saying "I'm part of the .crypto registry, totes.")
The registry would be a smart contract. There doesn't fundamentally need to be an owner.
>how are you preventing me from saying "I'm part of the .crypto registry, totes.")
Name resolving doesn't have to be done by ICANN's domain name system. You can have alternates that do not depend on centralized servers.
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?
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.
[My home computer] --> SSH --> [my hardcore IndieWeb local cloud]
That's about it. Safe enough.
In 25 years of hosting a dozen domain names on a server on my home connection, this problem has not surfaced for me.
For someone who knows what they are doing, it's more like mosquito noise, a mere nuisance, but even then, using a rock solid system with all updates installed carries the risk of having a zero-day.
If your server is networked to the rest of the house, and if somebody manages to get in, then it's all fun(!).
Especially if you host something like wordpress with plugins you really have to be on the ball with updates.
That said, the practice of running a modern corporate web browser that auto-executes all programs sent to it from arbitrary unknown third parties is a way, way, way bigger and more common and likely attack surface than a simple static webserver serving files in directories.
I don't think ipv6 only is feasible yet unless your audience is exclusively in Asia where ipv6 uptake is much higher due to them running out of ipv4 years ago
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.