I used to host this blog at Pika, and altogether it's been a very nice experience. They offer a well-crafted editing experience, come out with nice features regularly and aren't over-priced.
So why did I move to another host?
Well, money was one reason. It's only about $5 per month, but I'm not exactly a well-known, popular blog. I barely require any bandwidth, definitely not a CDN for images.
And I actually found that I a) like markdown editing a bit more instead of fiddling with links and foot-notes in web-based WYSIWYG, and b) mostly post from the same machine, so having a good editing environment available from every system isn't that much needed. I have no issues having a build-environment that mostly makes sense on a desktop system.
Pika, written in Ruby on Rails, generating rather complex, dynamic web pages was appearing a little bit too bloated for my tiny writings.
So, self-hosted and self-written? #
I considered that seriously, and almost fell to the temptation. The biggest thing that saved me was probably that I needed to move quickly, as my yearly pika subscription was running out.
There's a myriad of decent static site generators or light-weight content management systems, and another myriad of interesting programming languages that I could use to write yet another one myself.
But I would've tinkered.
I would've re-written something that's 75% done.
And I do need to blog more, not write blogs.
The prosaic solution #
Right now (2025-10-30) I'm hosted on prose.sh, which is part of pico.sh, a pretty neat series of internet toys for "hackers". I can host web pages there, this blog, I can have tunnels so that everyone can access servers I'm running on local machines (neat for testing), and it's all accessed with basic Unix tools, like ssh or rsync.
I can have a lot of that free, or pay twenty bucks per year for it, supporting the developers.
Also, publishing a blog means writing markdown documents and just copying them to the server. So if I never decide to go fully self-hosted, I'm a good way to the site structure I need for that. Given the pain of exporting the pika dump (JSON with literal HTML embedded), I want to be a lot more future-proof here.
This is the barebones solution. There's just a directory of images and markdown files. The files have "aliases", so the old links would work. The old RSS sadly doesn't, but I doubt I had many subscribers.
Galleries suffered. My conversion scripts made serial lists of images from the very neat two- or four-up image sets Pika offered.
But prose.sh allows for some CSS customization, and I have to bike-shed at least a little bit...
In other news #
October was a hell of a month. Some private things happened that will have some repercussions for a long time.
But things are calming down, so I'm hoping to be more present here in my new blog-home.