Like so many others I also have created my own website to show my artwork (photography, printmaking), recipes for the benefit of others with dietary restrictions (low-sodium), and software projects.
But to me it's much more than a website. Behind it is a set of software tools I've been developing for website generation. The public-facing website is in effect a major demo of what the tools can do. The programming challenge is what makes it worthwhile, stretching the site's capabilities is highly rewarding. Also improving the site's performance and efficiency is a benefit of "roll-your-own" site creation. Polishing it to excellent results contributes to a sense of accomplishment.
Anyway it's pretty easy and cheap to use a modest VPS to host the site. If a person has the knowledge running a self-managed host is quite practical and allows maximum freedom and minimal risk of "deplatforming" that was going on a while back even if the risk is near zero.
I never expected to get a lot of traffic, though there is some. One surprising aspect has been the number of attempted "break-ins" (e.g., via ssh). Properly configuring a firewall is a necessity. But that stuff is just part of normal administrative responsibility.
WP and SSH seem to be the most common bot attacks. SSH is easily mitigated by changing the default port from 22 to something else, and adding in fail2ban.
As for WP, I like to use a static site generator like Hugo, unless you have huge requirements for dynamic server side resources (versus of a site with 1000s of pages, albeit static and highly cacheable).
Yup, changed SSH port from 22 to another, the attempts to barge in continue but don't succeed. The motivation for trying to intrude escapes me. I mean if a site is well-known it would make more sense. An obscure and obviously personal site, hard to fathom what breaking in would accomplish, unless some really bored or antisocial people out there consider it a sport of some weird kind.
My site is currently >100 pages, so it's modest in scale. Like many sites it consists mainly of static pages but there are dynamic features too, such as basic user comments and messaging. The generator program outputs the html, css and js needed. Written primarily in object-oriented Tcl, pages are generated from source files expressed in a generator-specific DSL. In practice it's way simpler and less exotic than this description suggests. To me "proof of the pudding" is that I can easily pick up where I left off even after being away from the project for a few months.
A goal for the generator is to finish packaging and documentation, then releasing as open-source. Not that there aren't already a million ways to create websites, but I figure one more can't hurt! ;-)
But to me it's much more than a website. Behind it is a set of software tools I've been developing for website generation. The public-facing website is in effect a major demo of what the tools can do. The programming challenge is what makes it worthwhile, stretching the site's capabilities is highly rewarding. Also improving the site's performance and efficiency is a benefit of "roll-your-own" site creation. Polishing it to excellent results contributes to a sense of accomplishment.
Anyway it's pretty easy and cheap to use a modest VPS to host the site. If a person has the knowledge running a self-managed host is quite practical and allows maximum freedom and minimal risk of "deplatforming" that was going on a while back even if the risk is near zero.
I never expected to get a lot of traffic, though there is some. One surprising aspect has been the number of attempted "break-ins" (e.g., via ssh). Properly configuring a firewall is a necessity. But that stuff is just part of normal administrative responsibility.