Tech
The free and easy solution to self-hosting your own blog
I have been writing daily since 2018 through the form of a personal journal, and later through my travel blog. The platform I've used to write has changed many times since then–from handwriting journal entries all the way to emailing a newsletter to my subscribers–I've probably tried every medium of writing in between.
After exploring every option under the sun, I've come to the conclusion that self-hosting your blog is doable, but not readily apparent. My solution is one that requires some technical knowledge, but not much.
Keep in mind, by self-hosting I mean that the content appears on your website, which is being self-hosted.
I want to preface this by saying that there are plenty of blogging tools out there if you just want to pay somewhere between $7-17 a month. Some of the best ones are:
There are also plenty of free blogging tools if you are fine with your content being hosted on someone else's website. I've explored with plenty of these in the past as well:
As a software engineer however, I wanted to be able to self-host my blog on my website which I coded myself and is hosted on Vercel.
This left me searching for an option that allowed me to harness the power of someone else's editor, but display the content on my own blog via an API.
Unfortunately, Substack does not have an API, and Medium's is deprecated. Ghost and Blogger have fantastic APIs, but Ghost costs $9 a month, and Blogger limits you to 100 blog posts on their free plan.
If 100 blog posts seems like a fair trade for a free plan, then you can definitely check out Blogger and their API.
However, I found a solution that is just as free, and slightly better for a few reasons which I will explain later. The solution is DigitalPress. DigitalPress markets themselves as a Ghost Blog for $0/month. They have a free tier of their platform that is effectively a Ghost Blog, which would otherwise cost $9/month. The way their offer this plan is by adding ads to your blog post.
The other limitation of DigitalPress's free tier is that they only offer 1GB of storage before you have to upgrade to their starter plan for $7/month. However, I've written 22 blog posts so far, and they've all been embedded with high quality pictures and GIFs, and I've only used 4% of my allotted storage. That means that I should have the ability to write over 500 blog posts before I need to upgrade, or 5x the amount allowed with Blogger.
I'm also unsure that the ads are displayed when rendering the post using the API. I definitely haven't seen any yet, which makes it even more worthwhile.
The other advantages that Ghost/DigitalPress have over Blogger are that it has the best blogging editor that I've ever used, as well as the functionality to send blog posts as newsletter emails, which is my favorite part of blogging with Substack.
So there you have it! From my own experience this is the easiest, fastest, and most seamless way to self-host your own blog. It took a few days of digging to come to this solution, but now that its set up, I'm extremely glad that I went in this direction.