Why I self-host my whole corner of the internet
On owning the stack — one domain, one server, and the freedom to put anything on it without asking permission.
I registered hamzazagha.com and decided to do something slightly unusual with it:
host everything myself. Not just a static portfolio, but real apps — some public,
some private — all under one roof I control.
The idea
One domain. One small server. A reverse proxy that routes the domain to as many apps as I want. A shared database. And a single password that can gate anything I’d rather keep to myself. Adding a new project should feel like dropping a file in a folder, not provisioning infrastructure.
Why bother
- I understand the whole stack. No magic I can’t see or move.
- It’s cheap. A single VPS runs a surprising amount.
- It’s mine. Nothing gets deprecated out from under me.
The goal isn’t to avoid every managed service forever — it’s to keep the core simple enough that I could rebuild it from memory.
This post is the first thing living on it. More to come.