After 27 years of self-hosting, a web veteran shuts down his servers
genmon · x · 2026-10-25
Matt Webb (via genmon's RT) is shutting down the personal web server he has self-hosted for 27 years, archiving old sites to static HTML on shared hosting and moving his blog to GitHub Pages. He recalls self-hosting war stories—rushing to a datacenter at midnight in 2004 to rescue a glitching drive by sitting it on ice cubes, nearly catching a falling server with his skull.
The trigger is the current wave of vulnerabilities: keeping years of PHP/CGI apps secure no longer feels worth it. He notes Claude speeds up patching, but the calculus tipped—security is now someone else's problem. The linked post also mentions a neat trick: asking agents to sign your guestbook.txt, a static canary file for detecting agent break-ins.
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