If you are at all technically minded and have some kind of public presence (the appropriate test for this being “would someone want to hire you based on what they know of you in particular?”), then you should really host your own website. It’s relatively cheap, easy, and maintenance-free.
This piece is not meant to be comprehensive. Use The Google.
The fundamental reason for having your own website is to control how you present yourself. In other words, you don’t want to depend on other companies for this. Geocities has come and gone. Myspace has come and gone, Facebook is here now – although you shouldn’t be using Facebook for your online presence anyway – but it will also one day go. As will Twitter, GitHub, neocities, and most other services you can think of. The web has existed since ~1990, and so as of the time I’m writing this, it’s 26 years old. You can then reasonably expect it to be at least 50. How many of the companies above do you expect to exist in 2040? And yet, you should by all means plan to be alive and professionally active by 2040.
Instead of depending of fleeting companies, you can invest a weekend of time learning how to host your own website and your own server.
I currently use namecheap for my domain purchases, and you can get many of them for around a dollar a month.
I use DigitalOcean for the actual hosting. This webserver currently costs 20 dollars a month machine because I host other services, but I’m considering downgrading it to a machine a fourth the price.
In case any of these companies go out of service, you can simply move your domain and machines to competitors. The important thing is that your website keeps the same address and look.
I used to host my server using Linode, but I
switched to DigitalOcean recently and
I’ve been happy with it. You can also use Amazon’s famous
EC2 service, but its UI is atrocious
for a simple use-case like this. I suppose you could use Microsoft’s
Azure, but you can take the / mountpoint from my cold, dead hands.
Unix is older than windows, and yes, it’s awful. But my bet is it will outlive Windows.
You don’t want to be futzing around with the latest, coolest Linux thing. Not for this. Remember, you’re setting this up so that you need to make real updates once every year or so. I like Ubuntu LTS (Long-term support) versions for this, and currently that means 16.04 LTS. Canonical promises 5 years of support, which means that you’ll ideally only have to fully install a new operating system in your server once every five years. That’s not very long-term, but it’s a good, sweet spot in terms of longevity and convenience.
I am currently running Ubuntu 14.04 (although it’s really not important, and I actually had to check).
You will be doing a fair amount of logging into this remote machine you now have, and you will want to automate a lot of it using scripts. As a result, you really want to set up passwordless login with SSH. Matt Might’s excellent SSH hacks articles covers all the bases here.
You don’t need PHP, ASP, Rails, Express, Flask, Tornado, or anything that runs actual code every time a webpage is requested from your server. Stick to HTML served from Apache or nginx, and that’s more than good enough for a personal webpage. It cuts down drastically on maintenance: you don’t want to keep worrying about security issues that pop up with PHP or node or every other day, and you really don’t want your server being compromised, and used as a spam relayer or Bitcoin miner.
Instead, choose one of the boring web servers - Apache or nginx are both fine choices. Most importantly, both have vast amounts of easily searchable information online. For this, Google is really your friend.
I use nginx.
Create a webpage! Either use your favorite text editor to write HTML by hand (I know, yuck), or use a static website generator. I currently use Jekyll.
You’ll need to maintain your server. I use automatic security updates on Ubuntu, and plan to update the actual OS once every 4 years or so. Every once in a while this means you’ll want to run a new version of some software that’s not available in the Ubuntu repositories. That’s annoying, but it’s far less annoying than having to worry about your Wordpress deployment getting hacked on a weekly basis.
If your cloud provider (in our case, DigitalOcean) goes down, so will your webpage. This is annoying, and is arguably a reason for you to go with older, stodgier companies like Amazon. But Amazon services also go down, and since we’re shooting for a sweet spot between convenience and longevity (and not an impressive number of nines in our uptimes), I don’t think you need to go with Amazon.
If you use Amazon’s storage service, then you can host a static website directly from one of your S3 buckets. I don’t expect S3 to go away in 25 years, so this might actually be a feasible long-term solution.
Site 44 (disclosure: I know one of the folks behind it) is a good short-term alternative if you don’t want to host a server yourself. Buy a domain, get a Dropbox account, and you’re there. When they eventually go out of service, though, you’ll have to come back to this page.
Github pages with custom domains. If you already use Github, another option you have is to use Github pages and associate it to your domain. This has about the same trade-offs as site44 above: if you like Github, it’ll be convenient. If you don’t, it won’t. In addition, if either of Github or Site44 or Dropbox go down, so will your webpage.