This blog is self-hosted on a small dedicated PC at my house
My first acquisition was a small inexpensive fanless PC. in looking at options I stumbled onto these little “video servers” that would bolt to the back of a flatscreen TV in a doctors office and play videos like “You & your root canal” or such. I chose one with a 2ghz quad core celeron with 4gb ram and a 64gb SSD drive. The pc is about the size of a hotel bible. 2 firewire, 2 usb, vga/hdmi/wired ethernet & wireless all in a hefty metal case with power supply etc for $60. A better deal than a raspberry pi especially factoring in 64gb SSD and it runs intel apps.
I then downloaded Turnkey Linux wordpress appliance image. Turnkey has about 100 “appliance” images that run specialized things like wordpress, jumla, BBs, ruby on rails, nginex etc. The WordPress image was about 450mb and is offered for free.
Use a program like Etcher and burn the wordpress image to a USB drive.
Set the fanless pc to boot to usb and install the turnkey image. The startup screens prompt you for a database name, set your static network IP & passwords. Ports are used for web administration and are set automatically. Post install the fanless pc can be run “headless” with no monitor, keyboard or mouse. Make note of the IP address of the appliance. this process takes about an hour tops including burning the usb image
Go to your router and forward port 80 to the ip address of the wordpress appliance.
Go to whatismyip dot com and copy your public IP displayed there.
Go to namecheap and grab a $7 basic top level dot com domain name registration with no hosting. Go to the control panel & advanced DNS settings and create an ARECORD pointing to the IP address you got from whatismyip. They also have a ddns updater if your ISP doesnt dole out static IPs.
Type your domain name in a browser and it should bring you to a generic wordpress landing page theme. Append the url with /wp-admin and log into the back end–install a preferred theme & create your content.
Total cost $67 and I have 59gb of free space on that 64gb SSD–thats a LOT of content space and way more than you’d get from free hosting sites like X10. The fanless pc consumes low amounts of power and is designed for continuous use
UPDATE 4/29/23–I bought another NUC pc (featured image) and it as a 128gb ssd and 8gb ram. Plenty of horsepower for a blogsite