Putting myself (and my photos) out there

I hesitate to call myself a photographer, but maybe I am given how much I've been itching to make a photography website for the past couple of years. I take photos for fun. I've never had any formal instruction besides an intro class I took in middle school, which probably doesn't even count. But photography always manages to become something like a job for me whenever I travel somewhere. I'm not really sure how or why it became that way. It just is. For a while I've wanted to build the site from scratch. To be honest though, that's probably why it's always been on the backburner. So, for better or for worse, I've settled on paid services for now. Are they privacy-friendly? No. Does my pride hurt a bit knowing I could probably figure out how to do all this from scratch? A little bit. But sometimes the convenience is worth it. I have friends who have been waiting for over two years to see some trip photos, and now I can point them to an actual website. My best friend has a photography…