Frank
The blog you’re reading runs on hardware I own, in a house I own, on a network I manage, behind a stack I built myself. Not WordPress.com. Not Substack. Not Ghost’s hosted tier. Mine.
That’s the answer. Now here’s what it actually cost, and most of it has nothing to do with money.
The Decision Was Never About Platforms
I’ve been in IT for 28 years. When I decided to start writing publicly, a hosted platform was never the obvious move, even though it would’ve been the easier one. I think best when I’m writing, and the process of getting this thing running, breaking it, fixing it, and breaking it again is part of how I figured out what I actually wanted to say here.
That’s not a justification. That’s just honest. I figure things out by doing them. Reading a comparison post about WordPress.com versus Substack versus self-hosted WordPress and then picking one, that’s not how my brain works.
But let me be clear about something: running your own hardware isn’t some enlightened decision that makes you better than people on Substack. It’s a tradeoff with real costs, and the tech community almost never talks about the costs. They talk about the freedom. The flexibility. The “it’s all yours.” What they leave out is the part where it’s all on you, in the worst possible way, sometimes.
The Part Nobody Puts in the Tutorial
Self-hosting WordPress means you’re the hosting company now. That sounds obvious. It doesn’t land until your site goes down at 11 PM on a Thursday because your reverse proxy decided to have a personality crisis, and there’s nobody to open a support ticket with.
On my setup, this site runs in a Docker container through Caddy as a reverse proxy. I migrated from NGINX Proxy Manager. That migration went fine, until it didn’t, and I spent a Saturday afternoon I will never get back troubleshooting a cert renewal issue I introduced myself. WordPress.com doesn’t have that problem. Substack definitely doesn’t have that problem.
Then there’s the update cycle. Managed platforms handle their own infrastructure. I handle mine. WordPress core, plugins, the PHP version on the server, the container in Docker, the backup job to one of my Synology NAS units, and the restore test I keep meaning to run more often than I actually do. Every one of those is a task with a due date that doesn’t announce itself until something breaks.
The Hidden Tax Is Time
Every hour I spend on infrastructure is an hour I’m not writing. That’s the real cost. It scales in ways you don’t anticipate when you’re in setup mode and everything feels interesting.
Setup mode is the fun part. Always is. You’re making decisions, configuring things, watching services come online. It feels productive because it is productive. The problem is that setup mode eventually ends, and what you’re left with is maintenance mode, which is just setup mode without the dopamine.
Hosted platforms tax you with money. Self-hosting taxes you with time. Substack costs you nothing to run but gives you no flexibility. WordPress.com costs you a monthly fee but means someone else is watching the server health. Self-hosted means you’re watching it yourself, or you’re not watching it and hoping nothing falls over while you’re at work in your home office running Exchange troubleshooting tickets.
Neither of those is wrong. But the time cost of self-hosting is almost always underestimated, especially by people who do IT work all day and assume their off-hours work will feel different. It doesn’t. Not always.
What You Actually Get That’s Worth It
The tradeoffs are real. So are the reasons I’d make this same call again.
What I get that Substack can’t give me:
- Full stack control. I can add PHP applications alongside WordPress, run things in containers, integrate tools I’ve built myself, and structure the backend the way I want it structured.
- My own database, literally. The data lives on hardware inside my house, backed up to NAS units I also own. That’s not a philosophical statement, that’s a practical reality about where bits actually live.
- No platform risk. Substack has survived on venture funding and goodwill. WordPress.com is fine today. Neither of those facts is a guarantee about five years from now.
- I learn things. This one matters more than I expected. Running this site has made me sharper on Caddy, on Docker networking, on Authentik’s LDAP integration, on a handful of things that have crossed over into useful at work.
That last point is personal. Your math might be different.
The Honest Answer for Most People
If you’re not already running a homelab, self-hosting a blog on your own hardware is probably the wrong call. The overhead is real, the learning curve requires genuine interest to climb, and the managed options have gotten good enough that the capability gap isn’t what it used to be.
Substack is legitimately excellent for writing. If your goal is writing, and only writing, Substack will get out of your way better than anything else. WordPress.com has improved significantly. Ghost’s hosted tier is worth looking at if you want something cleaner than WordPress without managing infrastructure.
The “run it yourself” argument used to have a strong capability case behind it. Features and flexibility that managed platforms simply didn’t offer. That gap has closed considerably. Now the case is more specific: run it yourself if you already run other things yourself, if the maintenance cycle doesn’t feel like a burden, or if you’re using the site as a proving ground for skills you’re building anyway.
For me, it’s all three. This site shares infrastructure with HomeBase, Crumble, and a handful of other things I’ve built. The whole stack is an ongoing project I’d be running regardless. Adding a blog didn’t meaningfully change my maintenance load.
The Part That Surprised Me Most
I expected the technical overhead. I didn’t expect how much the ownership changes how I write.
There’s something different about publishing to a platform you manage end to end. It’s harder to be casual about it in a bad way. The writing feels more deliberate, maybe because getting the words online required actual work, and I’m not about to waste that on something half-baked.
I can’t tell you if that’s a rational response to the situation or just a psychological side effect of effort investment. Probably both. But the posts I’ve written here have been more considered than anything I’ve thrown into social media, and I think the physical reality of owning the thing I’m publishing to has something to do with that.
Running your own hardware is inconvenient in specific, manageable ways. It’s also the only arrangement where you’re not a tenant.
That’s what makes it worth it for me. If it sounds worth it to you, you’ll know fast, right around the time you’re in the middle of a midnight cert renewal issue with no support ticket to file.
