Moving to a Web Host

For a long time, this website ran at home – on a “small” server in the basement, somewhere between NAS, homelab, and the rest of the self-hosted infrastructure. That worked fine and was cheap, but at some point one thing started to bother me more and more: the website was directly tied to my home connection.

Separating Traffic #

Plenty of things run at home, including publicly accessible services for friends and family. Still, I wanted to keep the traffic for this website separate from all that. When someone visits here, it shouldn’t have anything to do with my private internet connection – both for privacy reasons, and simply because it feels cleaner to keep a public website and a home network apart.

Independence When Things Break at Home #

The second point was reliability, specifically for the website. A firewall restart, a brief (hmm) ISP outage, some network reorganisation – and the site was just gone. For a personal project that’s not the end of the world, but it kept reminding me of how directly everything was connected.

With a dedicated web host, the website is independent of all that. It runs no matter what’s going on at home – and that feels good.