Having my own instances of things is cool. Websites, apps, databases, all mine and completely under my control. Except I’m beginning to wonder whether I want that control.
I’m down to 2 instances at DigitalOcean. The first is my “static” server which runs the Caddy web server. I keep all of my static sites and files there. Until yesterday, this site was there, too. The other server runs Ghost, the engine for my CopingMechanism blog.
Over the weekend I made a bunch of changes to this blog, and in the process moved hosting back to Netlify. I’ve gone back and forth on this at least a half-dozen times. It’s such a relief to simply do a git push and have Netlify grab the repo, build the site, and pour it into their CDN. I don’t have to worry about a thing. And yet, before long I always miss worrying about the things.
Having a folder of HTML files served up with a simple web server is so comforting. Hosting is a breeze on cheap hardware. I have access, direct access, to everything about the site. I have server logs that can analyze traffic and look for 404s and such. I can put my arms around it. This is also comforting.
And what about other apps and services? I still have a free tier of Cloudron on an EC2 instance running a photo gallery. Cloudron makes me want to host my own stuff. It’s so easy. But a while ago I’d decided against having to manage a bunch of separate self-hosted apps, so I’m supposed to be phasing that out.
But what about?… :)
I don’t even remember which app I considered self-hosting when I began writing this post. One minute I’m trying to get rid of everything I have to manage and the next I’m pulling it all back in.
Well this ends with no resolution whatsoever, sorry. I told you I couldn’t decide.