Hardcore IndieWeb: Run your own website 100% independently for only $0.01/day

Hardcore IndieWeb: Run your own website 100% independently for only $0.01/day

Adam Newbold

July 18, 2026

If you’re not familiar with the IndieWeb movement, it’s a practical approach to maintaining your presence on the web that emphasizes fully owning your identity and your content. This is especially relevant now, at a time when a growing number of corporations want to own and control those things for you. The IndieWeb ethos seeks to eliminate external influence and control over both you and your stuff.

And as with any movement, there are a bunch of different services out there aiming to help you plug into this modern independent web. I even run one myself! But I always place my values over profit, so I don’t have any problem sharing the simple truth that you don’t need a fancy subscription blogging service to join the IndieWeb. In fact, when you use one of those services, you’re actually taking a step back from real independence, because your content often winds up living in someone else’s database on someone else’s server. They’ll tell you that’s OK because you can always export it whenever you’d like, in open formats, and of course that’s nice. But you still don’t fully fully own and control your content when you’re dependent on someone else’s service.

There’s nothing wrong with using those services, to be clear. And if you’re already using them and happy with them, that’s great! This guide isn’t for you. But if the idea of having complete independence and control over your content on the web is appealing to you, read on. Because that’s what Hardcore IndieWeb is all about.

Defining Hardcore IndieWeb

Hardcore IndieWeb fully embraces existing IndieWeb principles; there’s really nothing new or different there. The key aspects of Hardcore IndieWeb are control over your content and portability of your website:

If your content doesn’t primarily exist on your own hard drive, you don’t fully control your content.

If you don’t have a copy of your published HTML and web assets on your own hard drive, it’s not truly portable.

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