Vercel would have been faster. A few clicks, done. This site would have been live before I finished my coffee.
Instead I spent an evening configuring Nginx, fighting with Node version managers, and explaining to certbot what my domain was. Then it worked, and I felt something I can only describe as disproportionate satisfaction.
I've been thinking about why.
Part of it is control. I like knowing exactly what happens between someone typing hanyan.dev and seeing my words. There's a chain — DNS, TCP handshake, TLS, Nginx, Node, the filesystem — and I put that chain together. I can inspect any link in it.
Part of it is the principle of the thing. The early internet was supposed to be a network of peers. Anyone could run a server. The web was genuinely decentralized in a way it hasn't been for a long time. Hosting your own site is a small, probably futile gesture toward that original idea. I make it anyway.
And part of it — I'll admit this — is that I just like knowing how things work. Not just knowing that they work. There's a difference. You can use a car your whole life without understanding internal combustion. But if you've rebuilt an engine once, you're never in the same relationship with cars again.
The stack, for the curious:
- Next.js on Node, running on a VPS
- PM2 keeping it alive across restarts
- Nginx handling SSL and proxying
- Let's Encrypt for the cert, renewed automatically
Nothing exotic. The whole thing costs a few dollars a month. It's fast enough. It's mine in a way that something running on someone else's platform isn't quite mine.
That matters to me. Maybe it's irrational. I'm okay with that.