Long story short, I use a Cloudflare tunnel and self-host it on an old laptop.
Short Story Long
When I decided to rebuild this blog, one of my goals was to make it as "cloud-native" as possible. As a (mostly) static website, I concede it's sort of unnecessary since there are simpler ways of hosting a blog that don't require maintaining a backend at all. e.g. using Github Pages. But as soon as you want to do anything other than serve static content, it's easier if you have a backend you control. For example, I host some other projects on this domain and I have a custom publishing workflow for my posts—both of which require server-side logic.
All that to say, I needed a backend somewhere and AWS is the cloud provider I'm most familiar with through work. But at work, it's not too often you get to try out new cloud services and stand up infrastructure from scratch. So, as with all my side projects, I took this as an opportunity to learn by doing.
my odyssey through the clouds and back home
Database
The first question was where to store the data. My existing blog used MongoDB, so I stuck with that to make the migration easy. The most cloud-native version of MongoDB is AWS DocumentDB—it's a managed database service with full MongoDB compatibility. The pricing page says:
With Amazon DocumentDB, you only pay for what you use, and there are no upfront costs.
Sounded good to me. Did I actually do the math on what an instance costs per-month? No. But after 1 month I found out it was lot. That's the purple bar on the stacked bar graph above. Paying $100 a month for a blog database was not in the budget. This is when I learned that using a managed database service for my blog posts is like buying a yacht for a canoe trip.
Then I found out that Mongo Cloud offers a free tier with up to 512MB of storage, so I switched to that. That's plenty for blog post storage. I guess that's still a managed database service, but it's free...so I took the free yacht.
Server
Next I had to decide how to host the backend. Building the backend as a Docker image would make it the most portable and easy to migrate, so that was a requirement from the start.
Naturally, the first thing I tried was AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS), a managed container orchestration service. Just upload your Docker image and click deploy, basically.
I tried that for a couple months, but just like DocumentDB it is prohibitively expensive—even at the smallest scale of deployment. It's the teal bar on the graph above.
I stopped using ECS and instead just installed the Docker engine on the smallest EC2 instance available (t2.micro). My deployment workflow is just pushing an updated image to DockerHub and then pulling and running it on the server via a Docker compose file.
Load Balancing & SSL Management
For awhile, I also proxied all the traffic to my blog through AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), but not because I actually needed load balancing. I wanted to use ELB to handle SSL termination and automate the SSL cert renewal for my domain name.
The alternative, which I had done before, was to route directly to my EC2 instance and handle SSL traffic directly via the app. I didn't want to do this again because using certbot + Java keystores (I run a JVM backend) was a huge headache, especially when it came to automated cert renewal.
But again, using a managed service like ELB is not cheap, even if you have very little traffic. It's the orange bar on the chart above. Paying an extra $10 a month just for SSL management...also not in the budget.
The better solution was to install an Nginx sidecar directly on my EC2 node which can handle SSL and proxies requests to my app. There's other benefits to using Nginx too, like response caching. After adding some aggressive cache expiration to the Nginx config, very little traffic actually ends up hitting my app and database.
The Final Frontier
All these optimizations dropped my hosting costs down to about $15 a month. Not bad... an acceptable cost for me to have a space to host side projects and share content.
But after running this for about a year, I looked at an old laptop I had sitting under my desk and thought, why not just run it there. For a laptop running linux, all you need to do is run:
# 1. Disable lid-close suspend in logind:
sudo sed -i 's/#HandleLidSwitch=suspend/HandleLidSwitch=ignore/' /etc/systemd/logind.conf
sudo sed -i 's/#HandleLidSwitchExternalPower=suspend/HandleLidSwitchExternalPower=ignore/' /etc/systemd/logind.conf
sudo sed -i 's/#HandleLidSwitchDocked=ignore/HandleLidSwitchDocked=ignore/' /etc/systemd/logind.conf
# 2. Disable sleep/hibernate entirely:
sudo systemctl mask sleep.target suspend.target hibernate.target hybrid-sleep.target
And now your computer never goes to sleep. Boom—you have a server.
From the networking side, I originally thought it would require paying for a static IP from my ISP, but turns out there are several good options for proxying inbound traffic to your home LAN now. I chose to use a Cloudflare Tunnel, which is completely free, and it works great.
Now I don't pay anything at all to host my blog*, and I still have the flexibility to run and deploy anything I want on it. It's kinda funny since the laptop is where I did most of the development for this blog. Now it's left the cloud and come back to the same machine.
you shall return from whence you came
TL;DR
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Even though the premise of AWS is "elastic" services that scale from 0 to infinity, there's generally a minimum level of traffic needed to make the operational benefits of their managed services worthwhile, financially. For some of the services, the pricing doesn't actually scale down to the level of a personal blog in terms of resource and traffic requirements.
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Pro-tip: utilize the free tier from cloud providers for small projects! There are tons of ways of hosting something like this for free. And a million ways to do it the wrong way, as I showcased above. For example, DocumentDB was costing me $100/month. DynamoDB would've been free for the same use case.
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Self-hosting in 2026 is much more viable now thanks to cloud networking tools like Cloudflare Tunnel, Tailscale, Wireguard, or free VPS providers. You don't need to open up ports on your home network to the internet or pay for a static IP.
*Alright, technically the laptop consumes about 6kWh of electricity a month, which costs me ~$0.80. Free-ish.