Empowering Family Legacy: How I Transitioned to Self-Hosting with Gramps Web

For several years now, I've been maintaining a genealogy website containing information from both my and my wife's family history. One of my main objectives has been to ensure this wealth of information is readily accessible not just for our extended family, but also for our children whenever they want to look into their roots.

 Initially, I hosted this website through a paid hosting service, utilizing TNG. While this setup served its purpose adequately, my recent acquisition of a Proxmox server prompted me to explore the possibility of self-hosting. Given this shift, I decided to transition to open-source software, as it would grant me greater flexibility in making adjustments as needed.

In my search for suitable open-source genealogy software, I came across Gramps Web. Its user-friendly interface and compatibility with the Gramps genealogy desktop software caught my attention.

Revolutionizing Mastodon Hosting: Trying Cloudflare's Wildebeest

I've been running my own Mastodon instance for a while now, but I didn't want to host it from our home network, so I decided to use Digital Ocean. Setting it up was fairly easy, using this droplet. The downside is that hosting the service just for myself comes at a cost, since their pricing seems to be geared towards hosting the service for multiple people.

Recently, Cloudflare announced an interesting alternative called Wildebeest, which is a Mastodon-compatible open-source server. What caught my attention is that it seems their $5/month Pages plan is enough to run the server.

One advantage of Mastodon is that it's easy to move your profile from one host to another, so once I set up the new server, moving over should be a breeze.

I'm going to give Wildebeest a try and report back on my experience.