I got tired of letting Bluehost extort me for a decade by jacking up prices every year for hosting and domain (~$200+/year), and finally took the plunge to move my WordPress site onto my own infrastructure at home since I have the means to do so. To facilitate the transition, I downloaded the site content and backed up the WordPress DB, and spun up a blank WordPress container on my Unraid server to load it back into. The most challenging part of the transition was getting DNS set up properly (I was already running NGINX Proxy Manager for some internal subdomains), and there were also some finicky instances in WordPress that were manually configured to certain Bluehost properties that gave me trouble. There are still a few small configuration quirks that I'm ironing out, but it's been 93% smooth so far. Oh, I also transferred my domain registrar to Porkbun which is fun.

I'm always looking for new opportunities to run things on my homelab that can save me money, and hosting my personal site on my server makes a lot of sense to me. I also enjoy retaining physical ownership of my content and data whenever possible, as has been the case with all of my personal documents and media. I see this as another win for personal data sovereignty, and I'll do my damnedest to keep a 99% uptime on this little site!

Coming next will be some site updates to my design portfolio and homepage, and adding a photos section for a small photo gallery. On the note of data ownership and sovereignty, I've also been taking a dive into the Fediverse via my home server, which I will write another post about in the future.