Your Website is Useless
Most artist websites are bad. They either fail at their purpose, don’t have a purpose, or their only purpose is to point visitors to more active social media.
It is impossible to follow or keep up many artists’ work if you don’t want to look at Twitter or Instagram (nevermind that there’s always the chance you’ll miss their work even if you do follow them there). Their neglected, second-thought websites don’t bridge the gap, if they even have one at all.
This, despite growing popularity of social media “breaks,” “hiatuses,” and “detoxes,” is frustrating. No one denies the negative effects of social media. Everyone says “good for you” if you tell them you’re taking a break or quitting, but so few take the time to make their work accessible to those wanting to step away.
Websites as Portfolios
Most artist websites are portfolios intended to accompany a resume for the primary purpose of soliciting work. These sites tend to be minimalist and simple, with a Gallery of art and a Contact page, and maybe a brief About page or CV.
But portfolio sites are often outdated; the further along in their career an artist is, the more likely it is for this to be the case. If anything, the artist updates social media way more often, and a potential client or employer is better off looking at their Twitter or Instagram for recent work — which is fine, since most of those clients and employers do just that, or social is where they found them in the first place.
The portfolio site is just a token, a relic, a name claim on the domain. It’s mostly useless, and no one expects it to be anything more.
Websites as Portals
Some artist websites don’t even bother trying to be portfolios. They’re just a sandwich board pointing to social media, because everyone understands that’s where the action’s at. You can’t “follow” a website, right? (Wrong, but if an artist doesn’t update the website regularly, then following a website is pointless even if the technology is there.)
These portals are especially depressing because clicking on social media links without being logged into an account just results in endless prompts to download that app. You often can’t see art at all, or the experience is extremely subpar and annoying. There are some ways to get around the barrage of “sign up/log in” alerts in desktop browsers, but they’re annoying, not obvious to laypeople, and you’re still SOL on mobile.
Portal sites are helpful for linking out to a long list of third party social accounts, especially if the artist has a different handle on some sites/apps. In this way, these websites do fulfill their purpose — they’re not useless — it’s just that their purpose is sad and subservient, ceding superiority and importance to social media.
Websites as Places To Be
Websites used to all be destinations.
Some early Internet sites which have stubbornly continued to exist all this time, sometimes past their original owners’ deaths, are huge repositories of information, articles, opinions, etc. They often look comically outdated, but they’re still valuable to the communities they’re a part of. To be fair, lots of these old sites don’t have RSS/Atom feeds and thus also can’t be “followed,” but the point remains that more websites used to have actual value beyond simply redirecting visitors somewhere else.
In early Internet fandom, artists and writers used to (have to) self-host their art and writing. Tiny, dedicated shrine sites to an artist’s favourite character or series were common. Despite centralised fanfiction repositories existing even in these ancient times, many authors still self-hosted their fic and maintained a “home base” separate from centralised mirror sites.
No one does that anymore. Social media is easier. And “free.” Many niches still have very dedicated fansites, but personal websites aren’t really a thing these days, at least among artists (and fanfic-only writers). Personal sites, and blogs in particular, are a bit more common among nonfiction and original fiction writers and people in tech, but artist websites are nearly all portfolios or portals.
It’s a shame.
In addition to art, lots of artists have produced incredible tutorials and other resources or shared important stories and valuable experiences — but these things are regulated into long, poorly formatted tweet threads or shoved into Instagram story highlights, making finding and referring back to them difficult. These platforms weren’t intended for such uses, but people make do, because that’s what they know, and that’s where they live.
Social media is a “destination,” but it’s an constant stream of impersonal chaos and an awful archive. Content on social is meant to be consumed immediately and forgotten. Likes and favourites lists are unwieldy and yet universally unsearchable. Liking an artist’s post doesn’t mean you’ll ever be able to find it again, but saving things to a local drive also isn’t a habit people have kept. (Social media doesn’t make that easy either.) Everything is ephemeral, impermanent, lackadasical.
Websites as Archives
The whimsy, transient nature of social media is part of its appeal. Lots of artists only post doodles and sketches because they know they’ll disappear from the timeline quickly enough, or because they’ll only be up for 24 hours or so in Stories. It’s all low risk and low stakes. They’d never consider posting those silly things on a real website.
And it’s easier to share a personal story when you’re composing it 280 characters at a time and publishing it as you go, without thinking about or knowing where the end may be. It’s at least easier than staring down a blank text editor with no limit and having to decide later how much of a 2,500 word rant is worth sharing, anyway.
Websites are what you make of them though. It’s possible to dedicate a space for stupid doodles and keep it separate from the portfolio pieces. There’s still value in keeping those doodles around, archiving them, and making them easy to find and refer back to. Many of my favourite “pieces” from artists are stupid doodles. Many of my favourite pieces from myself are stupid doodles.
And you can still write about experiences 280 characters at a time if you want to. Just collect it later for the website. Archive it somewhere proper. Even if it wasn’t even an important or consequential story, it could be worth looking back at later, or it could be important to someone else.
I don’t expect people to give up social media. For artists in particular, it’s hard to compete with the “reach” and the ever seductive possibility of a viral hit.
But artists wouldn’t lose anything by making their websites more of a destination either. I can’t save my spot scrolling through someone’s Twitter feed. I can’t filter or sort it by arty images only. I can’t go through it in any real organised manner, and the artist couldn’t make that easier for me even if they wanted to. Instagram Story highlights are terrible to try and manage. Are Twitter Moments even a thing anymore? A properly updated website could be the solution.
Making Better Websites
But actually, artists do lose something by making their websites more useful: time and energy.
I still think one of the reasons Tumblr became so popular, for artists and in general, was because it was the social media platform that gave people the most control while still allowing them to be part of a network and publish things quickly. You could post art in less than 15 seconds, as everywhere else, but you could also post up to 10 images at a time (up from Twitter’s 4, and this was years before Instagram finally allowed multi-image uploads in 2017).
You could tag posts, creating a basic taxonomy and more functional/useful archives. You could customise your layout (with real HTML and CSS, even). You could write however much you want. You could hyperlink text (shock! amaze!). Tumblr was one of the only platforms that supported RSS, that had decent export tools, and that didn’t force you to have an account to look at things, etc. It gave users freedom and flexibility that was unheard of in walled gardens of social media platforms.
It was the closest you could get to making a personal website without self-hosting, and you were still a part of a broader platform and community, so you could still take advantage of the networking effects and possibility of virality. Win-win for users — except that Tumblr never became profitable, which led corporate sales, unpopular changes, and its ultimate fall from grace.
Honestly, if everyone went back to Tumblr for posting art, I’d be pretty happy. I can follow via RSS without ever looking at the Tumblr dashboard. I can search archives by keyword, tags, or date. Glorious! But Tumblr’s had a tumultuous history, and while I think Tumblr’s in decent hands these days, I still think self-hosting is the best solution because it’s the one that gives artists the most control and certainty.
But it’s the most work.
Incentivising Websites
It’s hard to blame artists for the lack of effort. Most are already juggling too many hats, and there’s little incentive for them to put time and energy into alternatives when the vast majority of their audience, peers, clients, and employers remain on social media. Many got their breaks on social, went viral on social, gained huge followings and found success on social. What has their website ever done for them?
So what if an artist’s work is inaccessible to people who choose not to partake in social media? Those people are such a minority, and accommodating them is so much work. Artists do enough work. It doesn’t make sense to invest energy into something with poor returns.
Having to maintain an email list newsletter takes a surprising amount of time, and the “reach” may still be worse than on social, because people have such a fraught relationship with email. (Also, lots of inboxes have sort algorithms these days…)
Updating a website is a chore when your first instinct is to tweet, and cross-posting social media posts to a website is a technical ordeal. There are lots of solutions for “how to auto-tweet when you post something on a [WordPress] website” but none for “how to auto-publish something on your website when you tweet.” Social media platforms have zero incentive to allow users to be able to cross-post from their platform, only to their platform. All of the results instead rely on embedding the Twitter content, which still only exists on Twitter. A visitor to the site can see the tweets, but they still can’t follow them without also having a Twitter account.
I actually wish there was an open source version of Tumblr. That interface is simpler — indeed, it was so simple that browser plugins like XKit became widely used to implement many, many missing features (some of which are finally being added to Tumblr officially) — but that simplicity was also what encouraged its rapid growth. It would be easier to convince artists to manage their own websites if they could just install a self-hosted version of Tumblr and go.
WordPress is powerful, but the cost of that is its complexity. And somehow there aren’t many better solutions for content management systems.
I still don’t know what the answer is.
This post would take 47 separate tweets to post on Twitter, but the fact is that more people would read it there. Each individual tweet could be retweeted for its own separate chance at virality. More people would reply to it, add their own commentary, start their own discussions.
Why even bother post it here instead of there? Because damn, it looks so much better here, in coherent paragraphs, with actual headers. Because I like being able to link things in my writing, to be able to make references, give examples, share context. Because it’s so much easier to write without thinking about character limits or having to re-compose each of those 47 tweets to make sure no words are getting cut off. Because my “content” isn’t for Twitter (or Medium) to profit from. Because a million other things.
My constant plea is for artists to put in a little more effort for their websites, but I don’t think there will be a compelling reason for most to do so unless more people abandon social media. Etsy just raised their fees, and lots of sellers are looking into alternatives again, but most will still stay. Etsy has clout and an audience; self-hosting is a lot more work. When artists began abandoning Tumblr in droves, most of them just ended up on Twitter. Hopping on another platforms will always be easier.
The barriers to setting up and maintaining a website are still great. It’s hard to begrudge anyone not wanting to expend the time, money, and effort… but if you have these resources to spare, I’d really like to be able to spend more time looking at artist websites instead of artist Twitters.

STRONGLY AGREE!!! As someone who has very few social media accounts, it’s SO disappointing how much work it is to find some artists.
Really good points all, I found myself nodding along a lot while reading. Yes, we do do that, yes, oh gosh… Ha! But I have one question– how do you think one balances a gallery website vs a portfolio website? Usually a portfolio, “here’s a bite-size sampling of my best works” type of site is meant for brevity, not a lot of scrolling. But a gallery site, like if one were to upload literally everything they felt like sharing art-wise, wouldn’t that be too much? Do you think there’s any merit to a mass migration to places like DeviantArt? Great article. Thanks.
You can always separately out parts of a website — the nice thing about being in total control is you can really do whatever you want as far as organising your space.
For example, currently I have a portfolio at kiriska.com/art — I’ll update it every now and again, but most updates are edits to a page, and edits don’t show up in the RSS feed. Meanwhile, kiriska.com/sketchblog is my catch-all art dump that has basically everything, including the nice, finished pieces that may eventually end up in the portfolio. The sketchblog updates are included in the overall RSS feed for my site, and it also has a dedicated feed (kiriska.com/sketchblog/feed). Separating stuff out like this does often take some technical know-how or hiring help, but it’s definitely possible.
If I wanted, I could separate out the portfolio further and take away the clutter of a menu that makes mention of so many other things. I could put the portfolio on a subdomain or another domain entirely to make it simpler for potential employers. It could be a separate site. A lot of artists occupy a weird space where their professional work and their personal work are radically different, but they’re okay mixing them in “informal” spaces like Twitter. In those cases, it probably does make sense to have a personal website separate from a portfolio one, but again, the power is with the artist to decide how they want to build their spaces, how many rooms they want their house to have, etc, etc. This can lead to decision paralysis. Lots of people don’t know what to do with that power! But that power also gives you the ability to change your mind later, and you can rearrange things as many times as you want until you’re satisfied.
Sites like dA (and LJ) were honestly the far better precursor to modern social media sites. They gave a lot more control to users and were more transparent about how they made money (ads, subscriptions). The main problem is that they’re still “walled gardens” to some degree. You can view art without an account, but you can’t follow without one. You can’t get updates. It’s cumbersome to try and keep up with artists on dA without joining the site, and as an artist, it’s not easy to export your work if you decide you’d like to go elsewhere.
Absolutely loved reading this. You’ve done a great job on this piece and it really hits home. I’ve personally ditched social media many times, being socially cornered into coming back to it for various reasons.
I’ve noticed that the most active websites are the ones where the person who runs it doesn’t associate their real name with their online work.
Lots of artists occupy a space where their professional and personal work are different (pretty common in fandom), and it’s more comfortable for them to separate those spaces. Screen names and aliases are convenient for that, and I sort of like the idea of more people returning to using them. It’s never made anyone feel less real to me, anyway.
1.
I’m working on a personal website for my art right now. There’s a lot of choice paralysis at play, like, there’s TOO many things I can do with a personal site.
I was also worried it would sit there, unvisited and unloved. Its nice to hear that there’s still demand for this kind of thing. Even if this also confirms my fears that its gonna be a lot of work for low returns.
Now, if anybody wants to make a web artist webring…
2.
I had an artist I liked who quit Twitter for Instagram. And while that’s their choice – whatever – I don’t use Instagram. And so I can’t follow them anymore. Unless I also use Instagram, which I’m not gonna. And it stings extra hard, how much talent there is only on Instagram that I’ll never see.
3.
I’ve seen some epic character shrines on neocities. gimme those shines baybee
1. Having power is intimidating for sure! Honestly I’ve struggled a lot with this website over the years, but since importing my Tumblr archive over last year, this place feels more like “home base” again.
I think I might be down to take on setting up that artist webring though…
2. I feel this. I have an Instagram, but I have strict usage limits in place, and the algorithms are so bad these days I end up seeing the same posts 10 times instead of the whole breadth of work I should be seeing instead. It’s frustrating, hence posts like these.
3. Amazingly, there are still a tiny handful of character shrines I bookmarked from the early 2000’s that are still online. Most haven’t been updated in a decade or more, but just the fact that their owners are still paying the hosting bill warms a corner of my black heart.
1. If you need help with the webring, let me know. I can’t do much to help, but idk maybe there’s something.
I’ll consider importing my tumblr archives, thanks for the tip.
2. Yep same. Same.
3. Hell yeah!
I recently rediscovered TheFanlistings still existed, and somehow was still updating? I’ve been having a great time browsing there. (I know fanlistings are a little different than shrines, but only a little.)
I love discovering old sites which are somehow still online. I hope I can keep my current site online indefinitely (I’ve certainly let old domains lapse before oops).
Oh, MAN! TheFanlistings is such a treat. Many, many of the listed sites are defunct, but I love seeing these relics still kicking around.
I, too, intend to stick around for the long haul. This site has changed a lot over 20+ years, but it is still here, and I’ve actually kept all my old domains all this time, lol. Plenty of things aren’t online anymore, but everything redirects and will forever.
Within in the last 2 hours I found and read this article because someone shared it on Twitter, created a Feedly account, and added your site to said Feedly account. I also read the articles that were connected to this one, and I’m ~jazzed~ about improving my own site and migrating off of social media. I have a site through Squarespace, and they automatically come with RSS links! I think this post came at just the right time in my life. Thank you for writing this, along with all the other resources you share.
Thanks so much for reading! I’m glad the posts are helpful to you, and I’m glad more people are giving the website thing a shot! Looking forward to seeing what you post. :)
I adore your website! I. Really glad I found it and took some time to look around, I really miss doing that, and I look for any opportunity to do it more often to replace the time I spend scrolling. I’m so tired of scrolling!
I have a website where I put my webcomic and that’s home base for me (and I have a mirror on comic fury) but other comic sites that are more aggregate and social like webtoons and tapas, I tend to stay away from. They don’t fit my formatting and if I’m going to put the work in, I’d rather put the work into my own site where I have 100% control rather than fundamentally changing my work for social clout.
Your blog entry has given me more ideas for how to better utilize the website I’ve got! Thanks so much for writing this…I’ll be adding you to my RSS (:
Thanks so much! And yes, I agree! It’s nice being able to poke around someone’s website in a leisurely, straightforward fashion, going through all the menu links, reading everything at your own speed and knowing that if you’re interrupted, you’ll be able to resume later without much difficulty.
I’ve drastically reduced my time on social media over the last few years and have been reading lots of dead tree books instead, but not seeing new art from artists I like has been the biggest downside, so I really hope I’ll be able to add more artist sites to my feed. Big props to you to sticking to your guns and foregoing the reach on big webcomic aggregate sites!
I’m a non-artist, but most of my friends seem to be artists for some reason or another. Maybe I’m just an artist in denial. I suppose writing is one of the arts. Certainly I was a very enthusiastic (but also decidedly amateur) blogger back during the age of blogging, circa 2005-2015 by my estimates. I still blog, but the enthusiasm is gone. Ever since “social” “media” sucked all the oxygen out of the room both writers and readers of blogs are dramatically fewer and farther between. The “build it and they will come” nature of blogging is utterly lost, and I have no doubt the consequences are the same for artists as for writers.
Writing is certainly an art. I definitely agree that blogging took a big hit when Twitter specifically came into play. I still recall the specific worries that Twitter “would kill the blogosphere” from many around 2010. The blogosphere didn’t die, but it’s definitely much quieter. Some communities are still quietly thriving, but it’s not without considerable effort, including its major participants being quite active on social.
There was definitely a time when I was also much more active blogging. I mostly write for myself, but unfortunately human brains crave acknowledgment and feedback once they get it, even if that wasn’t necessarily what they were looking for in the first place. The feedback loop of social media deprioritises and diminishes the personal satisfaction aspect. Before, shouting into the void had some kind of charm to it. If someone replied, neat! But if not, you were just shouting for your own sake. Now, shouting into the void is depressing because there are loud conversations happening all around you in the other rooms.
Pre-social Internet was made almost entirely of creative nerds. If we can just carve back out a quiet space for ourselves among the modern noise, I’d be pretty satisfied.
You have just described the IndieWeb perfectly.
First of all, thank you for this amazing blog post. I build websites for webcomic artists and so I have a lot of thoughts about this. As I’m working I watch them try to adapt to social media only to get exploited or ignored. Because they can’t or won’t work by whatever invisible rules those platforms want them to.
At the same time I’ve seen how frustrating it is to make a website. WordPress is a very complex piece of software. Hosting and domain names are confusing. Then there’s maintenance and support: swapping out plugins, the site breaking when you update your theme, etc.
On the tech end, I’ve watched designers and developers try to solve this. Sometimes their work fades as the one or two developers who maintain it get a career. Others can never figure out how to make it easy. For example, there’s a really interesting visual site editor called Tina.io (https://tina.io/) that lets you edit your website directly like Squarespace. But I’d be scared to hand that to an artist without knowing they could call someone if it needs to be updated.
Wix and Squarespace help a lot but they’re both costly and basically platforms themselves. If the artist needs to leave, exporting can be hard unless a dev has built and maintained an import/export tool. I’ve read about some solutions (headless cms). But again: more technical stuff. For example – you mentioned wanting a way to pull tweets from your twitter and post them to your site. I immediately thought of tools like IFTT and Zapier that look like they allow you to post to your rss feed. (https://zapier.com/apps/twitter/integrations/rss) But I’d have to test it, and even the solution feels like stapling a sandwich together.
What do you think is an answer here? More tech people talking with artists? Getting people more involved in open source projects to help them thrive? Or just continuing to lower the cost of building and maintaining a personal site?
I’ve also built sites for webcomic artists, but the sad truth is that most can’t afford the services — especially when they’re first starting out — and I can’t afford for the services to be cheaper. And so most still end up on Webtoons or Tapas or whatever. Even those that do have their own webcomic sites engage with most of their audience on the centralised sites, which feeds that vicious cycle of self-hosted solutions feeling “pointless.” But there isn’t a great way to incentivise audiences to shift from using a centralised and convenient app to managing their own RSS.
I wrote a follow-up post about making websites, but it’s as you say, WordPress is complicated (and Gutenberg sucks), and there are still lots of other technical barriers. Visual site editors mostly suck or are extremely limited. I haven’t encountered Tina, but any solution that starts with
npm
ornpx
isn’t for laypeople, lol.But yeah, I don’t know what the solution is here, and that feels like the theme of all of the posts I’ve written on the topic. I want more artists to feel comfortable taking the initiative and owning their own sites and their own content, but I feel like the real catalyst will be consumers taking the initiative to own their own experiences online, to curate their own feeds, and to gradually take power away from Big Social Media… but the crux of everything is convenience, and owning your own experience will never be the more convenient path.
I want to write a (series of) post(s) walking artists through using WordPress for personal and portfolio sites, for webcomics, and for e-commerce, but frankly, this would be an enormous effort, and I’m not convinced it would actually help much… the post I wrote about making a website saw considerably less traction than this one as it is. Everyone agrees: it’s bad to rely on social media for your only web presence, but even as people acknowledge that, very few are willing to consistently put forth the effort to work on their own website, and I still can’t blame them, because it’s still hard/effortful/time-consuming, etc.
Even the simplest, cheapest, CMS solution tailor-made for artists would not be easier than social media, and the “reach” would also still be inferior.
I kind of just hope Tumblr will see some kind of resurgence under Automattic’s ownership, but I also think its time has passed, and there’s too much weird/bad press and history around the site for it to thrive again. Some open source version of Tumblr that could interlink instances to allow for interactivity under IndieWeb principles would be amazing though, and that in tandem with lowering barriers to installation and maintenance might be a good way forward, for artists at least. There’s still the audience to convince.
I’ve been really hoping that something like micro.blog catches on and then diversifies in a way that makes it basically “Tumblr but IndieWeb.” Alternately, that Tumblr learns to embrace IndieWeb.
My CMS Publ started out as a “like Tumblr but good” project but as usual I ended up scratching my own itches rather than building something that’d be useful for people who aren’t me. Because when I’m not being paid to do something and I don’t see any commercial feasibility for it, why wouldn’t I just make the stuff I want to use?
There’s been several attempts at making a self-hostable easy-to-use comics-focused CMS but all of them have had some pretty severe problems. I kind of feel like the only thing which had any understanding of how to make things dirt-simple for folks was Keenspot’s opensourced Perl-and-crontab thing, and that’s still a vestige from a bygone era when webhosting was “here’s a directory on a server where you can run scripts, have at it.” The entire webhosting industry has pretty much evaporated thanks to The Cloud™, with people being shoehorned into an ultra-scalable elastic service fleet (and pricing to match) for no particularly good reason other than trend-chasing.
I agree with both of you. The two major pieces of this problem: ease of use and interconnectivity, have had a lot of attempts at solutions but nothing feels like it’s stuck. And I think it definitely has something to do with the level of control people want. In building artist sites I’ve been surprised at what artists consider “control”. And how a number of artists just like being able to email someone to do it for them.
Some of this is why I think static site generators and CMS development has tilted towards making it easier for devs while attempts to making the tools accessible often come from gigantic, scaled up solutions like Webbly.
As for solutions – I’m curious how things will develop here. In terms of RSS, I do think it’s notable that people continue to use podcasts in an app run on RSS. But I think if you asked them what the podcasts app was, they’d probably say it was like twitter but for podcasts. So the tech still does what people want. It’s just doing so behind a curtain. There’s lot sof ways to hook sites together now. It’s just a lack of direction on how to reach people. That’s why I think a lot about your article on training your audience, Kiri.
Final thought: With industries pushing into software like headless cms that can post in multiple places – I wonder if cross-posting/multi-channel posting will become much more normalized? I feel like a lot of people still pick a social network and try to win it, but that puts their eggs in one basket.
Thanks for responding, both of you! Both of you have given me lots to think about.
One of the IndieWeb principles is POSSE – Publish Own, Syndicate Somewhere Else. Which is to say that you should be posting to your own site but then having processes to automatically repost it elsewhere, specifically because of the problems of social networks being very locked-in and proprietary.
It’s a model which works fairly well for me; I have my Atom feed, and then some helper things which use that to repost links to Twitter and Mastodon, and full-text to Tumblr. My comics also get syndicated to Facebook. I use OpenGraph cards so that links appear with appropriate previews on the various platforms, as well.
I don’t know what my actual readership stats are but the impression I get is that most folks see updates via Twitter and Mastodon, and very few are subscribing to the feed directly. But the great thing about feeds is that they’re intentionally usable by programs, and there are plenty of mechanisms for programmatically using them as intended. After all, the second S in RSS stands for “Syndication.”
The main rough edge for this is my private/friends-locked posts. My site supports a few mechanisms for privacy-preserving posting, but there’s no mechanism for that to cleanly work with the silos. Heck, most silos don’t even *consider* private posts as being a thing, with Facebook being the only real exception (of course Twitter lets you make an entire account friend-limited but there’s no granularity, and Mastodon’s privacy controls are both a joke and precisely *backwards* from how they need to be). As as compromise, when I post a private post, a “stub entry” gets syndicated out everywhere (except Tumblr) which informs people that there MAY be something visible if they log in to see it. This probably leads to a lot of disappointment/confusion from folks who aren’t actually on the access list (since they get a login form followed by “Unauthorized”), but I haven’t gotten any actual complaints about it yet, and most of the people who are actually on my friends lists do end up seeing the posts anyway.
I’m not familiar with this terminology “ultra-scalable elastic service fleet .” Would Heroku be an example of this? I encountered Heroku’s free tier when I decided to learn Ruby on Rails (home of the Red Screen of Death) and reached the point where I wanted to show something off (shameless plug), merely as poof of concept, but all the same. I have no audience, but if I did I’m not entirely sure what I would do next, it’s all so complicated. As far as I can tell the next tier up from free tier is $60/month. On the other hand I have a paid-for less than $10/month LAMP stack account w. a local hosting provider that I feel I get a lot out of—my blog, a few code portfolio type thingies in PHP (and even one in Ruby Off Rails), and a Baïkal server to help degooglify myself, if nothing else from calendar and contacts. LAMP stack hosting seems to me to be a commodity. I didn’t realize it was an evaporating one, but my ISP did get acquired, and mergers always mean paying less for more, and worse, “new normals.” I already got the “inflation affects us too” email, no doubt bracing me for some new normal that I’m sure is more merger-related than inflation-related. LAMP hosting has the virtue of being a simple, more or less standardized product category that I feel I more or less understand, but I’m probably way ahead of many in that department. I’d hate to see it disappear as a category of hosting service.
That isn’t standard terminology, it’s me being derisive about “the cloud” and things like Kubernetes, Heroku, and other things that are intended to make a site perform At Scale whether it needs to or not. A personal blog does not need to perform At Scale.
A basic LAMP stack can get you really far, yeah. I run around a dozen sites on a single Linode instance with no load balancer. It’s fine.
(Although the LAMP acronym is a little inaccurate in my case; I use nginx and SQLite instead of Apache and mySQL. And my P stands for Python most of the time.)
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