## title: End of my services
       ## date: "2026-09-07"
       
       ## Introduction
       
       Today's post is a short one. In it, I'm announcing that I'm
       ending the hosting of my services on the Internet. In this
       blog post, when I talk about alternative hosting, I am
       referring to an alternative to what the GAFAM companies
       offer.
 (HTM) GAFAM
       
       ## Alternative hosting
       
       This section explains why I've been hosting services on the
       Internet. For technical details, please visit this webpage.
       Also, most of the infrastructure components are listed in my
       organization's GitHub repositories.
 (HTM) this webpage
 (HTM) GitHub repositories
       
       ### Current state
       
       For about three years, I've been making free services
       publicly available on the Internet, open to everyone. Some
       services are on-demand because they require users to first
       create an account in my LDAP directory. There are various
       types of services, such as Gitea, Nextcloud, PrivateBin, and
       others, these are primarily browser-based services. As of the
       time of writing this blog post, all services are still
       available.
 (HTM) LDAP directory
 (HTM) Gitea
 (HTM) Nextcloud
 (HTM) PrivateBin
       
       These various applications are hosted on a VPS with Contabo.
       In addition to these, there are other applications that
       enable the proper administration and management of the
       services, some are designed to improve service uptime,
       others to manage the application lifecycle, others to
       monitor system status, and still others to manage
       application backups, etc. I believe this is a relatively
       comprehensive and advanced environment that will stand the
       test of time.
 (HTM) Contabo
       
       ### My motivations
       
       I've always thought alternative hosting was really cool, I
       was introduced to it by the tildes, who are the members of
       the Tildeverse. I did some research and quickly found
       CHATONS, a collective of alternative hosting providers. That
       inspired me to start offering online services, on my own
       small scale, for others and for myself.
 (HTM) Tildeverse
 (HTM) CHATONS
       
       ### My objectives
       
       At the start of the project, I'd never managed services this
       way before, with so many mechanisms involved. My goal was to
       learn the technical aspects, build my skills, and keep the
       setup running for as long as possible. I also wanted to
       offer an alternative to GAFAM services, which I find neither
       ethical nor respectful of their users' privacy.
       
       ### The End
       
       It was a very interesting and educational experience. After
       three years of keeping the services uptime as high as
       possible, performing maintenance, adding features,
       investigating various issues, backing up data regularly, and
       carrying out whatever other necessary tasks, I decided to
       stop maintaining these services.
       
       From now on, I'd rather focus on other things, I no longer
       want to spend as much time as before maintaining the
       infrastructure. Now that I have a job, I have less time than
       when I was a student, and I'd rather organize my time
       differently.
       
       ### Future
       
       In the future, I may continue to offer services, but with a
       much simpler infrastructure and a focus on specific topics,
       such as a Gopher holes hosting service.
       
       ## My static websites
       
       As for my websites, my personal website and my zettelkasten,
       I'll continue to update them, but both will be hosted on
       GitHub Pages.
 (HTM) my personal website
 (HTM) my zettelkasten
       
       ## Acknowledgments
       
       I'd like to thank the online communities, especially the
       pubnixes, that emphasize knowledge sharing and learning,
       that share their techniques and setups, and that provide
       public guides and resources to educate people. It's thanks
       to these communities that art, authentic and caring social
       interactions, and computing culture endure.
       
       This has allowed me to discover new things, computer science
       concepts, UNIX systems and programs, rabbit holes, and more.
       But the most valuable thing I've gained from this is
       computer culture. It's something that, unfortunately, is
       being lost and is becoming increasingly difficult to access.
       
       ## Conclusion
       
       It was a wonderful experience, I really enjoyed setting up
       my little server, writing the configuration files, and
       making the deployment reproducible. If you're curious, I
       recommend that you try hosting your own services online,
       either publicly on the Internet or privately for yourself or
       your loved ones. Anyone with basic knowledge of system
       administration, DevOps, or even SRE can do it, even on a
       small scale, like I did. And if you don't have the technical
       skills, this is a really fun project for learning.