Why I Still Run My Own Website

Every time I tell someone I run my own website, the reaction is usually the same: “Why? Just post on Facebook.” And I get it. Social media is easy. The audience is already there.

But this site is where my notes garden, my extension-cord post that still gets search traffic, and my Alex Eala tracker live - none of which I’d trust to a platform that can throttle reach or change export rules overnight. After years of bouncing between platforms and losing old PHP hosting with a chunk of my work, I keep coming back to one conclusion: nothing beats a place that’s actually mine.

You actually own it

This is the big one for me. On Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, or any other platform, you’re a tenant. You can be evicted, the building can be torn down, or the landlord can suddenly decide your kind of content isn’t allowed anymore.

I felt this before any of the big platform shutdowns - when my old PHP hosting died and took a chunk of my work with it. Same gut punch as Vine vanishing, just smaller and personal.

It’s not a hypothetical. Vine vanished overnight in 2017 and took everyone’s videos with it. Google+ shut down. MySpace lost over a decade of users’ music. Flickr slashed free accounts to a thousand photos and wiped the rest. Facebook quietly throttled organic reach for business pages from around 16% down to roughly 2%, and millions of small businesses lost the audience they’d spent years building. TikTok keeps shifting under creators’ feet. Even Twitter - sorry, X - broke thousands of tools and apps when it changed its API.

Your website doesn’t have any of those problems. You decide what stays, what gets deleted, and how long it lives. If your hosting provider goes down, you point your domain somewhere else. You don’t lose your work.

I get to make it look like me

Every social platform looks the same as every other account on that platform. Same layout, same fonts, same little quirks. A profile is a row of squares.

On jorap.com I picked Hugoplate because I already knew Tailwind - not because the demo looked prettiest. The notes garden gets its own nav. Blog posts and garden notes don’t share the same template shape. I turned off half the theme’s demo pages and kept what I actually publish. None of that is possible inside a Facebook profile.

The container is part of the message. When someone lands here, they’re in my layout, my typography, my weird mix of tennis stats and Instant Pot recipes - not a feed row that looks like everyone else’s.

It’s where my work actually lives together

My site is the one place the Alex Eala tracker, the extension-cord post, and the notes garden sit in an order I chose - not whatever an algorithm decides to resurface this week.

I group by topic because I want to, not because a platform added a tab. Search traffic still finds the Drupal essay years later. A Facebook thread about the same thing is buried by lunch.

Keeping it here also forces a small honesty check: if I’m not willing to give an idea a home on my own domain, maybe it wasn’t worth posting in the first place.

Writing things out makes you smarter

The act of writing a blog post - having to organize my thoughts well enough that a stranger could follow them - has taught me more than any course. When I wrote why I switched from Drupal to WordPress, I found out fast which parts I actually understood and which I’d been hand-waving for years.

And when other people start finding those posts through search, you realize you’ve quietly built up a useful little library - both for yourself and for everyone who comes after you with the same question.

Search engines still send people your way

Social media is great for connecting with people who already follow you. Search engines are great for being found by people who don’t.

Most online journeys still start at Google. A well-written post on your own site can keep pulling in visitors years after you publish it, with no extra effort from you. A friend’s Facebook post about the same topic is buried within a day. SEO isn’t magic and it isn’t instant, but if you publish consistently and write things people actually want to read, the search traffic compounds in a way social posts simply don’t.

My extension-cord post still gets hits every week - I wrote it years ago and barely touch it now. A Facebook thread about the same cord would be gone by lunch.

You can see what’s actually working

With your own site, you can install analytics and find out what people are reading, where they came from, how long they stuck around, and what made them leave. Not vanity metrics, real ones.

I found out my Drupal essay was still pulling search traffic two years after I thought everyone had moved on - that told me to keep long-form career posts on the site instead of threads.

Social platforms give you a thin slice of this, and only for the content you’ve posted there. With your own site you get the whole picture, and you can use it to write better, design better, and stop wasting time on things nobody cares about.

The cost is not the thing stopping you

People assume websites are expensive. Some are. Mine isn’t.

This site runs on Hugo, hosted free on Cloudflare Pages, with source on GitHub. The only thing I pay for is the domain - a small annual renewal. That’s less than two months of any halfway-serious social media ad campaign.

Even if you don’t want to mess with code, modern site builders (Squarespace, Wix, WordPress) will get you a clean, mobile-friendly site for the cost of a couple of coffees a month. The financial barrier mostly doesn’t exist anymore.

(If you’re curious how I built this one, I wrote about that too.)

“But isn’t it a lot of work?”

Honestly? Less than you’d think.

Once it’s set up, a personal site might need an hour or two of attention a month. Last month that was updating the Alex Eala tracker after Berlin and fixing one broken YAML line in a blog draft - not a second job.

Writing posts takes whatever writing takes - but you’d be writing those captions and threads anyway. The big upfront cost is choosing a platform and getting it live. After that, it mostly just sits there working for you.

Compare that to the constant treadmill of producing content for someone else’s algorithm, and a website starts to look like the less exhausting option.

What I actually do

I still post on social for reach. The site holds what I want findable in five years - essays, reference posts, stuff I’d hate to lose in a platform pivot.

I’m not asking you to quit Facebook. I sleep better with a backup I control. If that sounds worth an evening of setup, start small: one page, one post, one thing you’d miss if the app disappeared tomorrow.