Hetzner or OVH offer relatively cheap dedicated servers or VPS servers.
Namecheap is a good registrar.
this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2024
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Thanks. As I'm learning more about this, it looks like VPS is what I need. I think I'm going to give Hostinger a shot.
Just an update, so far Hostinger is working out ok. I gotta say choosing not to self-host was probably the best decision I'll make all year. There's a lot of security stuff I had no idea about.
Peertube was a huge pain - I never got it working on my own. Eventually, I got it and MediaWiki installed through Cloudron. Now it's just a matter of making a decent looking website, which is another of my weak points😐. Thanks for the help!
Glad to hear you made some progress. Wordpress is fairly easy to install and has nice themes. Hardest part is setting up a MySQL (or other *sql) server, but most self-hosted websites would need that anyway.
If you filter the alternatives https://alternativeto.net/software/wordpress/ by “hosted” and “open source” you can get a nice list of alternatives, too.
I may end up switching to something else. I'm doing a family history website, so MediaWiki seemed like a good choice because I like the Wikipedia style pages. But it's been pretty difficult to work with so far.
I had a course on Drupal and Joomla in college, maybe I'll give those a try if Wiki doesn't work out.
Wordpress sounds good too - I've heard that's the easiest to work with. Since this is a family history site, I've gotta think about the unlucky schmoe that has to take over this site once I kick the bucket.
Yeah, I fought MediaWiki and it’s won for now.
I tried it for the same reason. I like the Wikipedia style pages.
I haven’t tried Drupal in over a decade. Wordpress was a little easier at the time, but better for blogging than pages.
You might also look into tools that generate a static website. That way you’re not always worried about missing an upgrade and someone exploiting a vulnerability. Plus, your can just transfer the site to a new host by just copying the files/folders. And it can be shared on a USB drive, too.
Static would definitely be easier. I finally got MediaWiki working but it's really picky about what info I can enter and how I have to enter it. And if something goes wrong, it'll be a pain to get everything installed and working again, even with backups.
But Peertube was the main obstacle. Now that that's done, I don't think the website will be a big issue. The real issue is scanning thousands of photos, organizing them, and coming up with a privacy policy. I'll probably have to require a login because people don't want their photos out there exposed to the internet, but that's a whole other can of worms.
Just brainstorming here. Maybe I'll store all the personal info in MySQL (which I'm pretty good at) and serve the individual pages with Joomla. Having all the info in a database will make it easier to migrate to whatever the next platform will be. And the only people listed on the site will be already dead, so that cuts down on privacy/identity theft issues.
I've been dreading starting this project for over a year, but now that I've started, it's not so bad - kind of fun, actually.
I recently heard of Jeckyll but haven’t tried it yet. I couldn’t remember the name, and found a list of similar projects here https://kinsta.com/blog/static-site-generator/ but don’t know if any are any good, but the article doesn’t seem like trash. Maybe one will work for you.
Those look pretty good. I'm going to take a few days and try out some different things.
Another update. I went with Wordpress and it's working like a charm so far.
Another question - is Wordpress suitable for hosting thousands (upon thousands) of images, or should I set up something like Pixelfed to handle that? I'm basically trying to digitize as many photo albums, VHS tapes and obituaries as possible before this stuff is lost to time.
I’ve been pretty impressed with Piwigo for image (and video) albums. Actively developed. Customizable. User friendly. Easy to install (similar to Wordpress install).
I'm definitely going to keep that one in mind - it looks a lot more straightforward than Pixelfed. For now, Cloudron only lets me install 2 aps on their free plan. Installing another would more than double my hosting costs.
I guess I'll see how far I can get with Wordpress before I have to look at another option. Thanks for all the help!