The Era of the Personal Website

20 Mar, 2025

I've seen a lot of talk recently about how everyone should have a personal website, and I thought even though it might feel a bit repetitive I'd throw in my two cents.

When I was a little kid, my mom taught me basic HTML and had me do things like help her make big hand-coded lists and things to practice. At this time I had already experienced what a website is, and the idea of creating my own fascinated me. I remember how cool it felt writing out a list using <ul> and <li> tags and watching it pop up immediately in another window¹.

Now, in 2025, not many people even know what HTML is let alone how to use it - despite it being the easiest age to publish something on the internet! In maybe 5 minutes, I can write a simple page and upload it to any number of suites that will host it for free (or if anything, the cost of a cup of coffee maybe). Add a bit more time and $5 USD to that and I can have it on a custom domain. So why don't more people take advantage of it?

Oftentimes, I read IndieWeb advocates talk about social media being the antithesis of what IndieWeb stands for - often enough to the point that I don't think I need to stress that further. Instead, I want to talk about the fact that too many people see the internet as exclusively for businesses and corporations, because that's how they use it. The average person doesn't see someone's personal site on a daily basis, they go to Amazon or Facebook and see their presence on the web. If they see a single person's home on the internet it is typically in the form of a "personal brand" site for an artist or creator.

I feel lucky that I've found my community in nerds, who also love the IndieWeb, and that I've even convinced some friends to join me in the quest of building awesome personal sites². But I think as a whole, we need to do more. So, now that I've shared my own thoughts on the subject (and some of it being as repetitive as I expected...), I want to contribute to the benefit of the IndieWeb. Here's some resources I think are great for getting started building your own home on the web.

Actually building a Site

I always think raw HTML is great if you have the patience for it - if you want to learn from the ground up, check out HTML is for People by Blake Watson. It is one of the best web tutorials I've seen for a "non-techie" audience.

Otherwise, I'm a huge fan of the Jamstack concept - at the simplest level, the idea of a program that you can feed some template information and data and it will automatically make those raw HTML pages for you to upload. I've enjoyed my time on the web using Eleventy, but I also want to give a shoutout to Hugo and my own starter theme for it based on readable.css.

Lastly, if you don't want to have to deal with programming or tech-heavy software at all, check out Bear Blog - the powering force behind my site at the time of writing this post. Bear Blog lets you run a blog for free, editing done fully in a web browser, for free (or $5/mo. for images and custom domains). A small price to pay for a great tool, made by a great and responsive developer (Herman accepted my blog within a couple hours and answered a technical question I asked very quickly and with plenty of detail - what a guy!).

Hosting the Site

If you want to go the full "own your own data" route, there's nothing stopping you from spinning up a local or remote server and throwing data there. If you want to do this, I recommend Hetzner for servers and Caddy for a web server. This is a more complex route, and I don't have any tutorials handy for doing so, so pursue at your own risk.

Otherwise, there's a ton of sites out there for hosting static HTML files that work great. I can personally recommend Netlify and Cloudflare Pages. I know several people have had good luck as well with Backblaze B2, Neocities, and several others. HTML is for People, as mentioned above, also has a few recommendations and tips that might be helpful.

Addendum: When I originally wrote this, I forgot that my buddy Amin wrote about the same thing much much better than I could. Check out his post for much more info.

Conclusion

I'm sure most of the people reading this are in the same IndieWeb spheres as I am, and are already running their own personal website. But, I hope this post, no matter how far into the future, encourages at least one person to setup their own little spot on the web and continue to learn about the internet. I've been messing around as a web developer for most of my life now, and I've loved every second of it, so I hope you do too.

#'IndieWeb'