There is lot to be said for self-hosting various online services, and I have run a couple of servers to that end for quite a long time. Over the years they hosted websites, forums, jabber (if you are old enough to know what that was), irc, git, and of course email. But over time the list got shorter and shorter.

Email was the last big important service for me, but it became too hard to keep going eventually, and I switched to Proton.

(Email is usually given as the example of how great federated services are, but the truth is email stopped being meaningfully federated long time ago; most email is handled by either Google or Microsoft, and if you cannot send emails to either one of them, you are effectively de-federated. Google at least document exactly what you have to do to talk to their servers (though, of course, that doesn’t mean they don’t mark your mail as spam), but Microsoft has a habit of blocking whole IP ranges without any recourse.)

And so my servers ended just serving webpages. And every time I’d look over the access logs, I was meaning to migrate all my sites to simple static setups, the attacks on the web apps are endless, and it seems only a question of time when one of them succeeds. CVEs, and subsequent security updates are frequent, and sooner or later something somewhere will give.

I started the static migration a while back with tf.photography, using a ‘bespoke’ homegrown setup. This week I finally got the two remaining sites done, this blog, and aye.photos. Both of these were Ghost apps, and in both cases I used Jekyll for the new setup, it makes setting up a static blog-like site really easy, and I was able to import my old posts for both as well. (aye.photos is due for further rework, I want a look closer to what it used be, with a nice gallery on the landing page, but one step at a time).

Moving the sites to static setups reduces the hosting requirements, as well, and running a whole server just for that is an overkill. The free tier service by Cloudflare makes it possible to host static sites using their Pages services. I have been using the Cloudflare service to sit in front of my servers and provide caching for a while now, so moving the content there seemed like an obvious choice. And Pages service support Jekyll-based sites out of the box, which is a bonus.

And so earlier today I shutdown the two servers, and assuming no unexpected issues arise will delete them at the start of next week. End of an era for me, sort of.