The $0.01/day website: ditch SaaS blogging for hand-authored HTML you actually own

Adam Newbold makes the case for what he calls “Hardcore IndieWeb” — a maximalist take on the IndieWeb movement’s goal of owning your online identity and content. His core argument is that hosted blogging services, even IndieWeb-friendly ones with open export formats, still leave your content sitting in someone else’s database on someone else’s server. True ownership, in his framing, means the canonical copy of both your source content and your published HTML lives on your own hard drive. Two failure modes motivate this: a service shutting down before you can export, and a service owner turning out to be someone you no longer want to be associated with — both of which leave you scrambling to migrate.

The proposed method is deliberately retro, mirroring how people published on the early-90s web: write HTML in a text editor, preview it locally in a browser, and upload it to a host over SFTP whenever you’re happy. No frameworks, CMSes, static site generators, IDEs, or CLI tooling required — just a domain, an editor (he uses Nova), a file transfer tool (FileZilla or similar), and a cheap static host. He recommends NearlyFreeSpeech.net, a pay-as-you-go host costing roughly a penny a day with no subscription, where he’s had an account since 2008.

For a typical blog, he notes you manage the landing page, individual post files, an archive page, and even the RSS feed by hand in your editor — reframing that as entirely doable rather than intimidating. The piece leans on the idea that basic HTML is easy to learn and brings you closer to your content than abstracted modern tooling. The significance is less technical than philosophical: it’s a pushback against platform dependence and creeping complexity, arguing that genuine web independence is a choice available to anyone willing to keep their files local.