I have been doing a lot of interviews lately, and I am always surprised by the number of developers who don't have their own personal website.
Even frontend developers, who you would have thought would jump at the opportunity to show off their CSS chops don't have an online presence that they own.
A lot of this comes down to lack of knowledge with regard to hosting and the idea that web hosting is expensive.
What does it cost? #
My biggest business expense is sending out this newsletter at $29 a month, but most people don't want or need that.
To host your own website you ideally want your own domain which will cost you around $10 → $40 per year depending on the TLD. You can get domains from a registrar like Namecheap or Porkbun.
Then we come to hosting. How much you pay mostly depends on your experience and the type of website you want.
No Experience + Dynamic Website #
If you have no experience, and you want a dynamic website, i.e. one backed by a database then this is where things can get expensive but not prohibitively so.
A lot of people use WordPress when starting out. Prices for managed WordPress hosting range wildly. Look at these monthly costs:
- Wordpress.com: $8 → $55 / month (not including enterprise)
- WPEngine.com: $30 → $400 / month (not including enterprise)
If you prefer to use Ghost then their pricing isn't much better:
- Ghost.com: $11 → $249 / month
You can save some money by paying yearly, but there are much cheaper options.
Experience + Dynamic Website #
If you know how to host your own software then hosting a dynamic website yourself is going to be a lot cheaper than the above. Of course going this route also means being responsible for maintaining your server and keeping it up to date.
You can set up either WordPress or Ghost on a fairly small VPS provided that you don't get too much traffic. This can either be by installing them directly on the server or running them inside docker containers. Both require databases but this again can be run on the same server to start with. Later you may want to move it to a dedicated cloud database to make maintenance and backups easier.
There are plenty of places where you can get a small VPS for reasonable prices.
- Digital Ocean — prices start from $4 a month, and they even have a one-click WordPress or Ghost install option. This should be plenty for a small website if you are just starting out. This gives you 0.5GB RAM, 1 vCPU, 10GB Storage, 0.5TB of traffic.
- AWS Lightsail — this is the AWS's alternative to Digital Ocean. Again they have one click install options for most applications and prices start at $5 a month. For that you get 0.5GB RAM, 2 vCPUs , 20GB storage, 1TB of traffic. Basically double what Digital Ocean give you apart from the RAM.
- Hetzner — Hetzner has servers based in Germany and Finland. They might not provide one click UI installs of software but for €4.51 ($4.76) you get 4GB RAM, 2 vCPU, 40GB storage, and 20TB of traffic.
The other options which I have used for small applications is Railway.app. They give you $5 a month free which is enough to run small applications on. You have to be careful with memory usage, however. When I tried running Ghost on Railway it ended up costing me $13 a month.
Little Experience + Static Website #
By far the most cost-effective solution is to host a static website. Not having a database to worry about cuts down the costs and makes your website more secure.
You can host a static website for free using GitHub Pages or Cloudflare Pages. This should be more than enough for most personal blogs and supports having your own domain.
There are certain restrictions with these options. GitHub says that you shouldn't host any business websites with them and builds should be under 10 minutes. Cloudflare has a limit of 500 builds a month. If you just want to host a personal website this should be more than enough.
Experience + Static Website #
The last option should be more than enough for most people. Occasionally though you might have more requirements that can't be satisfied with the free options.
In my case I run my blog out of an AWS S3 Bucket, which sits behind Cloudflare for the DNS routing. With Cloudflare taking care of the routing I don't even have to pay for Route 53 zones. I then have a few AWS Lambdas that take care some redirects for things like Mastodon and other software that I run.
Cloudflare gives me some stats for my website per month:
- Requests : 2.48 million requests
- Bandwidth: 38.59 GB
- Visits : 963.15k
- Page views : 975.87k
These numbers seem a bit high but given I have dropped proper analytics from my website it is the best I can do. Last time I checked over a year ago I had around 45k visitors a month.
For this I pay $0.23 a month. A whole year of web hosting costs me less than a cup of coffee.
👨💻 Latest from me #
I am not sure if people have finally realised that Twitter/X is a waste of time or if there is something else, but many of my developer friends I used to follow on Twitter have moved to Bluesky. Bluesky is supposed to be decentralised like Mastodon but a bit more seamless.
Either way I am cross posting anything I put on my Mastodon server over to my Bluesky account and I will be a bit more active on there. If you are on Bluesky you can follow me @alexhyett.com.
Black Friday is coming up and as is customary it now lasts a few weeks not just one day. You can get 40% off my course or any of the other great courses or subscriptions on Dometrain with the code BLACKFRIDAY24.
❤️ Picks of the Week #
📝 Article — I quit Google to work for myself (2018) — I see this endless promotion cycle at a lot of companies, “Sorry maybe next year”. I wouldn't recommend jumping out on your own unless you have enough capital to sustain yourself for a few years. As you can see from his follow-up posts it took him 3 years to become profitable.
🛠️ Tool — Delta: A syntax-highlighting pager for Git, diff, grep, and blame output — This looks interesting. It was only the other week that I had a particularly large merge to do and managed to merge out a few lines of code from my colleague. It is easily done when the git diff seems to think you have replaced code instead of added to it.
🛠️ Tool — Audio Decomposition‚ open-source separation of music to constituent instruments — This is really impressive especially since the developer is still in school. I am sure it probably struggles a bit on more complicated tracks, but it is an interesting project.
📝 Article — We don't need to use what we make — I think is an interesting point. When I was making videos I was making them to help others rather than to improve my understand or as a note to myself. This newsletter on the other hand often covers topics which are currently in the forefront of my mind.
📝 Article — Supporting coworkers, employees, and friends in this time — I am not in the US nor do I work with anyone living there but if you do, this is worth a read.
🛠️ Tool — I Don't Have Spotify — I thought this was quite cool. Occasionally someone shares a Spotify link and I have to search for it on Apple Music. There is a Raycast extension too!
📝 Article — What I wish someone told me about Postgres — I have been using Postgres a lot at work. I need to read through this as it has a lot of good points.
📝 Article — M4 Mac mini's efficiency — I am quite conscious of power usage living in the UK. I pay 25.11p ($0.32) per kWh. So a computer running at 200W 24/7 would cost me £440 a year ($555). My 24/7 home server is a Dell Wyze 5070 and idles at around 10W (£22 a year) but it is nowhere near as powerful as the new M4 Mac Mini which idles at just 3-4W!
📝 Article — No GPS required: our app can now locate underground trains — This is really cool. It uses the unique vibrations of the different train lines to work out where you are.
📝 Article — I Followed the Official AWS Amplify Guide and Was Charged $1,100 — This is why people are afraid to self-host things in the cloud. There are far too many horror stories like this. There really should be hard limits to allow you to make sure this doesn't happen.
📝 Article — MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia — I loved reading about people using technology in a helpful way. I really think e-ink displays could be used more often as a lower power way to display information.
📝 Article — Daisy, an AI granny wasting scammers' time — I love this, although I am not sure how effective it will be now they have announced it.
📝 Article — Analysis of economic and productivity losses caused by cookie banners in Europe — my cookie banner solution for my website is to just not have cookies. That obviously isn't possible for a lot of websites. My particularly annoyance is when the cookie banner has tracking when you try and close it. My Pi-Hole blocks this going out which stops the banner from closing!
📝 Article — Naming My Computers — Like Robb I name my computers after Marvel characters. Particularly Tony Stark's AI. My 2 servers are called Jarvis and Friday. I don't tend to name my other computers, but maybe I should.
📝 Article — Maybe Bluesky has "won" — I have started using Bluesky more. It does seem like it is going to be the popular choice for most people. I must admit their API is weird. As part of the cross-posting script I am using I tried adding links. You have to do everything yourself from picking out links to uploading preview images for the websites.
👾 Game — Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Update — Half-Life 2 and the expansions is free on Steam until tomorrow!
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