Here’s a fact that’d make 1998-me laugh: in 2026, “self-hosting” is treated like a subversive lifestyle choice. People talk about running their own server the way they’d talk about churning butter. Quaint. Brave. A little weird. Folks, we used to do this on dial-up. The bar wasn’t high. The bar was “you have a power outlet.”
Somewhere along the way the industry pulled off the greatest rebrand of my career: it took the default state of computing — owning the thing you run — and recast it as the niche. Now the default is renting. Renting your CPU. Renting your storage. Renting the right to send an email from a domain you already paid for. We stopped owning, and then we forgot owning was ever an option.
And look, I get it. The cloud is genuinely good at some things. Spiky workloads. Global edge stuff. Compliance theater. If you’re running TikTok, by all means, rent. But the average reader of this blog isn’t running TikTok. The average reader is paying $40/month for a SaaS to host a Markdown file. That’s the bit that breaks me. The whole pitch of the modern web is “what if we charged you forever for a thing that should cost you nothing?”
Manzier’s blog — the one you’re reading — runs on a $5 box. Static HTML, Nginx, free SSL. The whole stack is older than most of the engineers building the alternatives. It’s not clever. It’s not novel. It’s just what we used to do, before some MBA convinced us that latency-to-our-own-files was a problem we needed to outsource.
The funny part? Self-hosting in 2026 is easier than it was in 1998. You’ve got Tailscale. You’ve got Caddy doing SSL automatically. You’ve got a thousand pre-built containers. The hard part isn’t the technology anymore — it’s the belief. Believing you’re allowed to run your own things. Believing the default isn’t actually a default; it’s a sales funnel.
So here’s the rebellion, which is also the religion: own your domain, own your data, own the box. Pay your $5. Cast your spells. Stop paying rent on things you could own outright. The wizard sleeps better at night, and so will you.