Self-Hosted Personal Site
A small corner of the internet, built and operated on a very small server.
THE STORY BEHIND THE BUILD
An Express and EJS site deployed behind Nginx on an Oracle Cloud VM. A home for selected work, personal writing, and the odd experiment.
01 / CASE NOTE
The idea
A personal website that feels like a personal website. It needed to be polished enough to show work, but loose enough to hold notes, strange ideas, and experiments.
02 / CASE NOTE
The approach
An Express/EJS application with a main-site area and a visually separate Labs area. Static content stays in files; experiments can introduce persistence only when they need it.
03 / CASE NOTE
The constraints
The original deployment targeted a very small Oracle Cloud instance. Nginx, pm2, and a deliberately simple runtime made the site practical to operate and troubleshoot.
04 / CASE NOTE
What I learned
Simple architecture still involves interesting trade-offs. Reverse proxies, TLS, deployment, and consistent server-rendered layouts all become real problems when you are responsible for the complete application.