Hello and welcome to the self-hosted web. What is this all about? Well, while it is as easy as supplying an email-address and a password in order to start sharing your texts, images or videos, it’s become increasingly difficult to find solutions which let you host your own content. Basically, the self-hosted web is an effort to consolidate all the software that allows everyday users to host their own content, on their own servers or server-space.
I will be writing not only about the software and server issues, but also (in probably somewhat sprawling prose) about the reasons to do this and why this might be helpful for the Internet and us as a society.
I’ve created a page dedicated to the software, I have called it The Repository. It is in its very early stage, but will be growing to gargantuan size (I hope). I’ve also added a page dedicated to good server or webhosting providers (which is also rather measly still) and as with the software I’m heavily relying on you good people to tell me about your experience!
Also, if you are a software developer and think your software fits here, a webhoster who finds the idea of promoting self-hosted software interesting or simply someone interested in contributing to this venture in text, information or any other means you might think of, I strongly urge you to write me a mail.
Daniel Messner, a good friend and fellow enthusiast, took the time out of his busy schedule to talk to me about this thing here and publish it polished and cleaned of my numerous “ahs” and “ehms” on his podcasting-platform aether.fm. A word of warning: the whole conversation is in German, but we’ll maybe try to publish something similar in English as well sometime soon! To listen to it, go here.
A quick word about me: I’m Richard Hemmer, currently residing in Vienna, Austria and am still signed up to and using about 500 webservices. While I will be trying to move more and more of these things over to self-hosting, I’m not yet ready to do this with everything (and I’m not advocating that you must do that, either, but this is something I will expound in a future post). For a somewhat consolidated page of what I do online with varying intensity, visit richardhemmer.com.
Well, then: bookmark this page, shove it into your favourite feedreader or simply memorize it (it is quite a simple name after all) and enjoy! Yeeehaw!
