alt Hacker NewsHardcore IndieWeb: Run your own website 100% independently for only $0.01/day
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Nearlyfreespeech is a great service though not a 100% independent as your still relying on them. I think the closest you can get to 100% independent without running your own internet infrastructure is either port forwarding from your home (if allowed) or hosting a website through TOR which isn't too hard. You just have to download the browser and edit a config file (torrc) with the port you want on the network. Not ideal of course though because anyone who wants to visit your website will need the tor browser and explaining to people that your website is on the "dark web" is a little hard to do.
I am a little surprised that doing so isn't more popular on in the indie web scene though as you do it on hardware you own, from your home, and the tor network protects people from knowing your servers ip address if that's something you care about. You could even go to your domain provider and have one of your domains redirect to your .onion address so people don't need to memorize it.
There also used to be the beaker browser which let you create and host your own website directly from the browser but that project got shut down. Hopefully something similar will show up at some point. Maybe a website creating plugin for tor would be enough to make it more popular.
This is a pretty weird article/movement. The greatest hurdle is almost definitely a domain name, which if you want to own the content you have to get. Which even the cheapest would cost you around 6$ a year. (I'm ignoring the "tk" tld, which is kind of a honeypot)
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.
Kind of funny that this is like some strange new concept... Having a web server and putting your stuff on it.
> 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"?
I’ve been using xmit.co for my static websites and it works fantastic (also free but I donate to the author yearly).
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.
Just a call out for sdf.org.
Perhaps useful for those training developers mentioned in some posts here who need the TIL experience with unix based systems. Free shell account on a netbsd unix, and I recollect that a small one-off donation provides access to Web space and other enhancements. Choose the login name wisely as that becomes the subdomain for the Web space.
Personal, but I’d rather learn and own a process.
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.
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/
I come at it from a slightly different angle.
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.
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
It is nice to see a site preaching this that isn't hosted by Cloudflare or GitHub Pages
this would work if we had free DNS. solving DNS to be trully decentralized and free is something for years I wish I had more time to work on and build
key properties:
1. everyone can be a registar. your localhost too
2. blockchain proof of ownership and discovery (certs, not proof-of-work, fast and cheap ledger)
3. everyone can be a CA (self-signed certs pinned in blockchain)
4. no fixation on static IPs (inspired by Cloudflare Tunnels, Tailscale). IPs are ephemeral.
5. blockchain/P2P discovery of domains
but it is all fantasy without real browsers support (Chrome, Safari). 99.999% of traffic is locked there, and both controlled by monopolies Google / Apple. and you cannot even build your own browser (Apple App Store will not allow it). Maybe alternative stores and some proxies / translation layer from normal web to this web would help.
> The methodology
No. That's the method.
The cost doesn't really matter as much as the payment methods, especially at that price point.
Payment methods are inherently discriminatory.
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.
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
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.
I created Neat CSS for some Hardcore IndieWeb users (though I’ve never used that name before now).
You’ll also find a free email course where I walk you through how I create a site using it. Link on that page.
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.
I opened this up thinking the same thing using NFS, and lo and behold that's what the author used.
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.
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.
you still need domain and static IP with this setup. and volumetric DDoS protection, ASN IP blocklists, and CDN — is not even mentioned here.
just use Cloudflare. get all this for free (except domain).
I'm just paying for the domain...
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?
Kind of similar to "tiiny.host" minus the custom domain and with a few file restrictions for the free tier but very similar.
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.
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.
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Personally I have used GitHub pages and cloudflare pages for hosting static sites and have been very happy with them considering the zero cost involved.
I don't think there is much difference between paying nearlyfreespeech (which I have done in the past) Vs using GitHub or cloudflare - you are still reliant on a third party for actual hosting. I don't really see any value in self-hosting myself - apart from nerdy satisfaction etc, I don't see the need.
The important part in my mind is the fact that I am manually controlling the assets - the HTML the images etc. Simple files on disk.
The git integration with GitHub and cloudflare though is obviously a huge boon though as now I have an off-site backup, and publishing is even more seamless than the old FTP/sftp days - just push to master from within vscode where you are editing the files anyway and it'll be live in 30 seconds (as well as backed up).