Hardcore IndieWeb: Run your own website 100% independently for only $0.01/day

variety8675

It is nice to see a site preaching this that isn't hosted by Cloudflare or GitHub Pages

superkuh

It's good advice, but one need not even include the "upload it to a web server" these days now that home connections are so fast. Install some static webserver on your desktop computer (nginx, caddy, whatever), forward the port 80 at your router to it's lanip:80, and just save .html and files to the web directory using your normal desktop interface. It doesn't matter if you shut off the computer sometimes. Uptime doesn't matter. Optionally file transfer (rsync, etc) this local copy to a VPS or something like the author suggests. 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.

tamimio

Well this is great, even going further and hosting the site itself and serve it instead of webhosts, but, now we have domains issue, a domain registrar hijacking your domain, which is your life work, email, etc., so there’s a need to have a free tld that’s uncontrollable by any entity, .onion isn’t practical obviously.

busymom0

I self host my site [1] on an old Mac mini in a Swift backend and sqlite database. Only thing I rely upon someone for is Cloudflare tunnels for free. I could replace that with port forwarding but so far, this way is pretty good. [1] https://limereader.com/

jdjdjdjdjd

Kind of funny that this is like some strange new concept... Having a web server and putting your stuff on it.

bartlebone

This article is a great example for anyone in their 50’s who is worried about not having relevant skills anymore. Although calling it hardcore makes it sound like porn. Too bad they had to add that term for something painfully not hardcore.

ivanjermakov

> run 100% independently > 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"?

_def

now the real fun part is how to self-host it on a machine accessible on the net without services like cloudflare or tailscale tunnels.

pagoto

Recently, I had to make a website for an event, so domain was needed, but what's cool with that is that the domain provider (Infomaniak, with which I am not affiliated btw), also provided 10 MB of storage which is large enough for a lot of things. So for something like 5€ per year (still more than 1c per day...), you can get the domain and the website, which is not too bad

qudat

Very cool! I run a set of ssh-based services over at https://pico.sh and love seeing all the indie web content on HN! Sftp is still very useful even in 2026

raytopia

Nearlyfreespeech is a great service though not a 100% independent as your still relying on them. I think the closest you can get to 100% independent without running your own internet infrastructure is either port forwarding from your home (if allowed) or hosting a website through TOR which isn't too hard. You just have to download the browser and edit a config file (torrc) with the port you want on the network. Not ideal of course though because anyone who wants to visit your website will need the tor browser and explaining to people that your website is on the "dark web" is a little hard to do. 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.

assimpleaspossi

I don't get it. I've been doing this for over 20 years exactly the same way. I even ran a business. The server I rent is $2/month. I read nothing new in anything in that article. I don't get it.

nosrepa

I opened this up thinking the same thing using NFS, and lo and behold that's what the author used.

ungreased0675

Azure has a free tier that is fairly generous.

codazoda

I created Neat CSS for some Hardcore IndieWeb users (though I’ve never used that name before now). https://neat.joeldare.com You’ll also find a free email course where I walk you through how I create a site using it. Link on that page.

est

Self-plug here. 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.

bryanhogan

I'm building an Astro starter template that also makes it easy to start your own website / blog: https://github.com/BryanHogan/astro-starter-template 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/ (Repo: https://github.com/BryanHogan/bryanhogan )

SilentM68

Kind of similar to "tiiny.host" minus the custom domain and with a few file restrictions for the free tier but very similar.

JSR_FDED

OK, if the reason to do this is to learn how HTML and web serving work, splurge and get a VPS. You’ll learn so much more.

jrm4

Old guy here, wild that people don't know this. 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?