A self-hosted blog born in quarantine

UPDATE (March 9, 2024): I’ve made some updates to the configuration of my self-hosted blog. Discover the details here.

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I’ve always been fascinated by machines and how they work: from airliners to vessels, trains, and even the Internet. Machines that work uninterruptedly and are interconnected by fiber optic cables running below the streets, roads, and oceans.

A couple of years ago, I saw an image on the Internet that caught my attention. It was a picture of the world’s first web server that, somehow, brought back memories from when I used to carry a floppy disk to get my first website hosted and updated on a machine in the computer store of my hometown. These were times when having home internet access was a coveted thing, not to mention 24/7 broadband access.

That image stuck with me for a long time, and with plenty of free time available during quarantine, I started to explore different ways to launch a small web server at home. Since I already have a desktop PC always on streaming audio for Blur FM, I decided to try a VPS on a VirtualBox machine first.

The Debian server proved to run very smoothly locally. Then came the hardest part of all: exposing the virtual machine to the Internet. It was a long way to go. My ISP uses CG-NAT, meaning that the public IP of my link is shared with other subscribers. NO-IP, which is one of the most popular choices for clients with dynamic IPs, was not a viable solution.

VPN tunnels

After weeks of research, I managed to set up a VPN tunnel using an Amazon Lightsail instance. With the static IP from Amazon and some tinkering with port forwarding and iptables, I found a way to expose my web server to the Information Highway.

I consider this a personal milestone because, even though I’ll keep relying on the cloud for everything, hosting this blog on my web server feels like a feat in itself. Now, I’ll have to add a note to my desktop like Tim Berners-Lee, considered the father of the World Wide Web, did 30 years ago:

“This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!”