Reflections on running a self-hosted personal site in the year two thousand twenty-six

Yet again, a long drought between my last post and this one. Unusual for me in the reasonably recent past, now a common occurrence. I keep asking myself “why?”, why am I not posting as much when I loved it so much before? When attempting to troubleshoot ways to mitigate some bonkers bad bot traffic on an org website that I help maintain, I finally realized: It is getting a lot harder to maintain a self-hosted personal site. I’m seeing all of the same problems that site is seeing, just at a slightly smaller scale and with less visibility since I haven’t had client-side analytics since late 2020. Picture the scene. You have a self-hosted personal site that has been part of your life for a well over 10 years. Maybe it’s a tech blog, maybe it’s where you share the trials and tribulations of being a parent, maybe it’s where you share your DIY misadventures, maybe it’s where you share recipes. The important thing is that it’s your space in an ocean of digital not-your-spaces, and that is…