Welcome to 192168285.xyz. Normally, this URL directs you to a (small) web- and file server that I built together with my friend and long-time collaborator Paul. However, I recently broke it when I tried to connect a bigger fan to it. Now it doesn't turn on anymore, I think I short circuited the processor. But I guess you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. Instead, this website is now hosted on another small server I built together with my friend Ada for Salwa Foundation, which is currently standing in the basement of my graduation show.
Hosting a website from here is not as easy as it might sound at first. First of all there is the issue of internet, or rather the lack of it: The building from where we are exhibiting doesn't have an internet connection. In order to solve this I put a large wifi dish on the roof. It's based on a design by Daniel Connell, who runs the website opensourcelowtech.org. It works like satellite dish for wifi: the wifi rays bounce off the parabolic dish, and get reflected towards a singular focus point. This greatly increases signal strength, and lets you connect to a regular wifi router over quite long distances (Connell claims up to 4km!). There are a lot of wifi networks around, and with a little bit of tinkering, we can piggyback on one of them for the duration of the show. Back when we squatted Hotel Mokum, this is how we stayed connected to the internet.
But there is another issue, and this one is a bit harder to solve. It's a bit difficult to explain without getting too technical, so the following will be a gross oversimplification, but: when you join a network, for example by connecting to a wifi network, or plugging an Ethernet cable into your computer, you are hidden behind the router. We can imagine this like a firewall of sorts, that makes it impossible for anyone on the outside to see how many devices are connected to the router. There are some technical reasons for this as well as some security benefits. If you want to run a server, you need to have control over the router, in order to expose your server to the outside world, otherwise people wanting to connect to it will not be able to find you.
In a set up like this one, we obviously don't have control over the router, since we are just joining someone else's wifi. So we need a work around: We can find another server that is already connected to the internet, and use it to forward all the traffic from our server to the rest of the world, bypassing the router behind which we were previously hidden. Finally, this lets us host our website from a remote location without a stable internet connection and we have succeeded in building a somewhat nomadic, and somewhat parasitic web server.
The self in self hosting can be misleading. After all, you rarely serve only yourself, but instead you are more likely to set up a server for your family, community or place of work, and often there is even a public involved. Additionally, this process heavily relies on the work and expertise of others, nobody could expect to truly host anything themselves—we rely on internet service providers, operating systems, software packages, web services you use, but also (open source) communities and the many many users in forums discussing and trouble shooting their problems.
But the self in self hosting is also self explanatory. At least in English, ironically, self can also imply others, it can hint at a community. We will do it ourselves—without you, @largercorporations and @governments. We will not be locked into your black boxes and walled gardens! Again, this is probably a gross oversimplification. But there is something nice about carving out a small niche for you and your friends, about occupying a piece of infrastructure and making it yours. About refusing to play along and to decide to try and do it differently. Self hosting can be strangely romantic.
Self hosting is not about autonomy, but about control over your dependencies. In this light I want to say thank you to Paul, Ada, Tharim, Leila, Jan Kees, Varia, Constant, and the countless users and blog post authors on the internet, that helped me begin to figure this out. As you can probably already tell, self hosting is not always easy. It's a process full of friction, compromise, and complications, and the benefits can seem elusive. But I think if you don't understand what the point is, it might not be for you. On this website, I want to give you, dear reader, the change to partake in this process, by making some (redacted) excerpts of my logbooks available to you. Chose one to continue below: