For decades now, I've designed and hosted a variety of websites. I stood up my FIRST website in 1997- later than the forefathers of the web, but much earlier than many individuals reading this were even born. This new-fangled thing called Microsoft FrontPage hit the scene- mimicking another great utility- the HotDog HTML Creator (which is somehow still around), but I was content to banging out hand-crafting my HTML in Microsoft Edit on my old Tandy 1000 RLX, meticulously banging out <HTML>, <HEAD>, <BODY>, <p>, etc., all the way down the file to the last </HTML>. I'd save the file to floppy as a text file, drag that floppy over to the machine I was using to connect to the web, rename and FTP the newly-file-extentioned .html file into the ether, praying someone would see my graffiti on the Information Superhighway (oh yes, I went there). Web hosting is a magical thing, from the underlying webserver technology serving up content, to the firewall allowing the specific traffic, to the routes, IP addresses, and DNS Root Servers all making the technology work in a way that web browsers can show you cat pictures.
As an infrastructure guy my whole life, I look at webservers the way a lot of other folks look at their model trains. Spending hours reading up on the latest track gauges, looking at "new limited edition" boxcars, sitting and painting the face of a figurine under a lighted magnifying glass with a 3-hair brush. It can be a moment of zen in a noisy world of airplanes, autonomous vehicles, and personal flying cars that always seem to be "just 5 years away". Pining for simpler times, yet, somehow playing god, almost making a mockery of the technologies of yesteryear, fitting it to MY vision. That figurine of the train conductor or switchman I'm painting, unlike when these things did rule society, CAN be a Black man, Trans female, anything I WANT. But enough with the metaphors. Because like the model trains reference, it's all quite dated, and my choices can continue to be an old man yelling at (the) cloud, or I can get with the times.
The world has moved on from even companies self-hosting their own websites. First you'd park it at GoDaddy- either as loose html files stored in a web-accessible directory on a shared web server, then into their horrendous website builder, and eventually, you'd realize the limitations of their horrendous website builder and rebuild it in a VPS, only to realize their VPS service is horribly overpriced and underpowered, which you'd then move to some dark seedy corner of Digital Ocean, and after the credits ran out or you just grew tired of emails being sent by the site getting marked as spam you brought it over to AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. And, in 2025, there are PLENTY of other cloud providers, but who really has just a simple website anymore or needs to worry about the emails from the site getting marked as spam? The emails don't come from the site anymore- no longer are you using GET/POST bullshit in your HTML to fire off a contact request- you likely have some embedded jscript form from Jira, Zendesk, or whatever. Hell, even this site uses an embedded Google Forms form to provide your unwanted messages. It's not just the hosting that's evolved over the years- it's the underlying technologies used to craft websites, the services that host those technologies as well, and frankly, how people use websites. Very few companies even host their own Wordpress site- plenty of webhosts offer, for just a few dollars a month, the ability to stand up a website using Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, or any other CMS imaginable, so you can focus on changing font colors and posting horrible recipe articles and not fighting your ISP for a static IP, or reviewing logs, or patching, or any of the other bullshit that comes with rolling your own solution- whether YOU host it or not.
RetroTech.io, like many other websites I've hosted on my own in the past, was "full-service". I had the public website where I'd post my rants and whine about whatever egregious privacy violation Amazon or Facebook committed this week, but it also included a fully-functional mail server for sending AND receiving (any emails sent to my email address wiggled their way down the pipes to the server sitting in my basement), our family's private cloud was hosted and accessible anywhere, VPN services to access media from home, the servers hosting said media, photo backups, you name it- I had more assets than many companies (both virtual AND physical).
Eventually, the email became the FIRST problem. I have a residential ISP account, which meant my IP address would change at random- sometimes 30 days, sometimes I'd have the same IP address for a year. There are additional services you can put in place to mitigate issue (DDNS, or Dynamc-DNS), but why should I have to pay? I have the hardware, I have the internet. Part of the issue, is that we've let ISPs go from being utilities to being yet another enshittified tech company. Put another way- imagine your water provider telling you that this water was only to fill your bathtub, you can't use it to flush toilets. Or your automobile manufacturer saying you can only drive this vehicle on roads that don't have the letter "A" in their name. ISPs constantly block traffic on email ports, especially port 25, hampering the ability to send email. And if you DO get lucky enough to get through to the receiving mail server, it just gets thrown into either the user's spam folder, or more likely, gets dropped entirely. And the burden to get around this has become incredibly high. Complicated layers of security protocols like DKIM, SPF, TLSA, etc., while woefully long overdue to try to cut down the very real spam problem that exists, are hard for people who have never touched the stuff. Even for seasoned vets like myself it can be cumbersome to configure. These systems, however, don't really do much to curb the problem, which is why such drastic measures are taken by blocking traffic on universally-used ports that have been around for 30-some-odd years. And GOD FORBID you, as a business, have Port 25 open because you are hosting your own mail (or at least a sender server) and you've not locked it down- disabling unauthenticated submissions- before you know it, ALL of your mail is getting blocked by spam filters globally because you ended up listed at Spamhaus or the likes. And if your shitty ISP doesn't do their due dilligence and issues you a static IP that's already on lists somewhere or classified as "naughty neighbor", you're in for a lot of headaches. We've somehow taken red-lining, the practice of designating entire sections of town as "bad neighborhoods", eliminating the ability to get a mortgage or insurance and digitized it with this practice. Why? For "security", of course. -_-
While you might be thinking "cool, just host your email somewhere else" or "use <insert hotmail/yahoo/aol/whatever>", that defeats the purpose entirely of domain-based email. Would you tell Amazon to do this? I guess maybe that's a poor example considering how much of the internet Amazon truly controls now, not to mention they offer business email services (most people don't know that AWS has it's own "for Work" service to offer email, document storage/collaboration, etc.) to businesses. So let's say I cave (and I have), I move my email to a paid provider. That only fixes ONE of the myriad of issues you face self-hosting- especially at home.
Websites are another pain point for a few reasons. Over the years, I've hosted sites in IIS, Linux servers using Apache, Wordpress sites in both Windows and Linux, the same combination in Virtual Machines to try to reduce the number of devices running in the stack, Docker, on a Synology SAN, and even Raspberry Pi 4 boards rack-mounted and clustered because as you can imagine, the power usage was insanity. This last go-round, I had the brilliant idea that I'll snag a cheap Mac Mini M4, which I did, and throw them on there. Except Apple have discontinued macOS Server, leaving you to fight various security layers by hand like Gatekeeper just to spin a webserver, or do what I did- put them in VMs ON the Mac Mini. And it was nice. For a while. Or so I keep trying to convince myself. While the idle power usage was a meager 5W, I was right back where I started essentially- dealing with multiple layers of obscure fuckery, network bridging to expose the VM directly to the firewall so I could port forward 80 and 443 to the VM, only to eventually realize I had nuked connections to the rest of my shit (like Nextcloud), and having to spin up HAproxy, move all Apache hosted stuff to other ports if they were on the same machine as HAproxy, and it just got old. All technically feasible stuff, but Jesus fucking Christ what a timesuck. All to... what exactly? I'm not running a public service, these are all private family-used projects, me tinkering with random shit Google claims isn't possible (like my proof of concept showing a post-handshake TLS 1.2 to 1.3 renegotiation for some...uh...friends of mine). And GOD FORBID you leave any website strictly http anymore. Which means you're either paying for "good" certs getting cut from a global root, or you're dicking with Let's Encrypt, which is a fantastic service don't get me wrong, but things get dicey when you put HAproxy in front of a site that has the site on a non-standard port, ACME fails unless you specify the non-standard port during the renewal, which means manual renewal, which means every 90 days you've gotta remember to get out in front of renewals before they lapse... it's just yet again more of a timesuck. So in conjunction with moving my email to Google Workspace, I'm moving this shite website here as well. Bread and circus for the end times, you know how it goes.
Something I hit on earlier- power consumption. While I had my power usage under control, the costs continue to spiral upward. We're in the dead of summer in Chicagoland, and like every other corner of the globe impacted by climate change, our average temps have been 15-20ºF ABOVE normal so far this summer. It's also been incredibly moist (sorry), which means that even with our new heat pump that's insanely efficient, we're still drawing quite a bit of juice. And since the datacenters from Facebook are sucking up all the power, ComEd has decided that it's on the backs of the regular person to fucking pay to buy more power from interchange markets since Facebook has like a 25 year negotiated rate. So our power bill for June/July, even though we used roughly 20% more electricity than May to June, was almost double thanks to fucking rate hikes. Our power bill was $500. And yes, while I'm shifting funds from paying additional power usage to paying some tech edgelord to host my shit, it's a meager difference in the grand scheme of things. Not to mention, and yes I know this rationale is feeding the exact issue I'm bitching about here, Google's hosting energy consumption is going to be hundreds of times more efficient than I could ever provide here at home, unless I start boring holes in the foundation and put the fucker on solar.
Does it sound a bit Stockholm-Syndrome-Like in the way I'm trying to justify all of this? Yeah. A bit. I won't lie, I'm a bit salty about this move because I don't like giving up control of things I've done just fine managing on my own for years. But times change, the world is no longer self-hosting friendly if it's touching public internet. There are threats around every corner, and I've actually had DDoS attacks against my site in the past that have completely knocked our home internet connection offline. I'm over it.
So I'm migrating all of my family's content from Nextcloud to Google Workspace, my wife is a Google Workspace user at her company anyway so she's quite familiar with it, which means there's no learning curve (unlike what I faced teaching her about some of Nextcloud's quirks)... so it's not a huge deal. Honestly, she's been a bit happier with this, as she uses and iPhone and automatic photo backup actually WORKS with Google Photos (sorry Nextcloud, that's not a jab at you in a harsh way, but you have to admit that the process is a bit broken- and I blame Apple not you for this).
The last bit is media. When I cobbled together this Mac Mini setup, I went balls out and loaded up the Thunderbolt ports with 8TB NvMEs to run our whole home DVR and host my media. I've completely given up on this. While applications like Channels are decent, I can't justify paying you $80 a year to watch stuff I own while fighting the constant "we can't find your server" errors in the app. Not to mention it's exhausting buying movies, downloading them with an archaic version of iTunes, forgetting the DRM schema changed for movies made after 2021 and realizing I can't rip the DRM off, tracking down a used Blu-Ray I can rip instead, just to copy onto the server and have it sit. So, the shit I've bought on various streaming platforms sits there and is viewed through their apps, and I've caved and turned on YouTubeTV again. The upshot is that while the ridiculous price of YTTV makes me cry every month, I can at least cancel many other streaming services that eventually added up to the cost anyway.
Did I go whole-hog into Google's abusive arms in this? Yes. But this is just where we are at folks. I'm not necessarily admitting defeat in some regards, and in others I am. I'll always have a fondness for managing my own stack, but it's time to tear down the rack, gut and bin the servers, and spend more time with my newborn and outside with my chickens. Maybe I can show my newborn the world before we cook the rest of it. Reflecting more on this feeling of surrender, I think it's because I'm an American, who's been raised like every other American- that is, in that our individualism and "trying to go it alone" attitude clashes heavily with relying on larger entities for things. At some point though, you start to realize the finer points of relying on your neighbor, on socially-available infrastructure and safety nets, and say "I'm too old for this shit".