Self-host your blog on a Raspberry Pi

Self hosting is cool, but if you actually want people to find your content my experience is that search engines will penalise heavily your ranking for being hosted off a residential IP that’s is not close to them and likely has a history of being unreliable. Unreliability and slowness both from the network latency and page rendering time (Wordpress doesn’t render so fast on a pi - at least when I tried it) will put you all the way to the bottom. If you don’t care about that then this is just fine, depending on what I am hosting changes where I put it, but stuff I want to be findable I host in cloud front/s3 as static pages and costs about $1 a month.

These are my notes on setting that up http://blog.cetinich.net/content/2020/2020-sphynx-ablog-blog...

I've been looking a lot into self-hosting recently. In my area, it seems that no LTE ISP will give you an suitable connection: they're all either behind a NAT, or behind a heavy firewall.

Now sure, I can rent a VPS to forward traffic to my device via a VPN. But that's not really self-hosted any more.

It seems a decentralised internet is becoming harder and harder with each passing day -- hosting stuff on an rpi at home is no longer possible.

Dropping ddclient into a docker container as part of your compose files takes very few resources, and keeps your domain name pointed to your current public IP through changes. I've been running that for years without any maintenance besides remembering how to use the config file when I need to add a new domain.

As I'm writing though, that probably wouldn't help in most university network setups, which the article mentioned. Tunneling is probably the path of least resistance there.

Step 1 is the most difficult. Buy a Raspberry Pi

> But if you are like me and your Raspberry Pi is sitting behind your router's firewall, you can't use this approach as your IP-address is changing all the time.

If your DNS provider has an easily usable API, you can set up something that checks your current public ipv4/v6 address and changes the DNS record if the IP address changes. You just need to set the DNS TTL to something smaller, such as 1 hour or less, to limit the impact of a changing IP address.

Docker has just been getting too good.

Now I’m waiting for someone to create a docker fork where docker has access to the host system directly outside of the VM and shared volumes.

What is the advantage of this compared to create some pages on for example neocities?