Hey hello, self-hosting noob here. I just want to know if anyone would know a good way to host my writing. Something akin to those webcomic sites, except for writing. Multiple stories with their own “sections” (?) and a chapter selection for each. Maybe a home page or profile page to just briefly detail myself or whatever, I don’t know. It doesn’t have to be fancy, and I apologize for not knowing how to describe this well. I’ve just been searching and searching and I don’t know what to look up to find what I want, it’s extremely frustrating. Any help is greatly appreciated.
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Just find a static host for free instead of dealing with it yourself. Million out there.
This is good advice. Learn about markdown syntax, try Obsidian to write notes that can be interrelated in a network, add drawings, and export selected notes to HTML. You can further stylize all of them with some custom CSS. There are many “content management system” (CMS) like Obsidian does. I’d self host ghostwriter. But just search for a CMS on awesome self hosted list and find something popular that’s akin to you for whatever features or underlying tech (e.g. Wagtail for django web devs)
Wordpress or some of its alternatives would probably work well for this. Another alternative would be static site generators, where you pretty much just write the content in Markdown.
It’s also a pretty simple project, it would be a great project to learn basic web development as well.
https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ If it’s just text, you can probably make a static HTML website and accomplish your goals. I’m not sure what format it’s in now but Markdown is what I use and then just export to HTML.
If you just want to host epub (or equivalent files), you can still make a static page and link to them with Cloudflare Pages, GitHub.io, or one of many free static page hosting sites.
I haven’t used an out-of-the-box self-hosted solution for this, but I agree with others that blog or static site generator software could work. I think the main challenges you’ll find though are: 1. Formatting the content/site for long-form readability, and 2. Adding a table of contents and previous/next chapter links without a bunch of manual work.
Fortunately blog and static site software have plugins that can add missing functionality like this. Here’s one for WordPress (that I have no first-hand experience with): https://wordpress.org/plugins/book-press/
I also want to ask: What’s your plan for discovery/marketing? Because one of the benefits of the non-self-hosted web novel sites is that readers can theoretically discover your story there. But if you instead just post it on your own site, how will readers ever find it?
For something like this, I think I would use Hugo to generate a static site. You write the post using markdown then tell Hugo to regenerate the site.
If you want to publish and receive comments or feedback via the fediverse, you might take a look at WriteFreely. Simpler to use but more complicated to setup.
Wordpress is also an option, but I personally don’t like it much. I spend all my time playing with all the knobs and never actually publish anything.
https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#blogging-platforms
It sounds like you want a blog that lets you categorize or tag your entries to keep them together.
I see some comments recommending wordpress but wordpress is a security problem, especially if you’re using 3rd party plugins. It is such a bad problem that their are ‘wordpress security’ applications but even then wordpress sites get hacked all the time. If you are going to use it, it is best to let some other host handle it for you if you don’t know a whole lot about what you’re doing.
There are many, many other content management systems out there. Some are lighter than wordpress and some heavier. They are all about posting and managing content. Most of them have some sort of user and authoring system. Once you’re webserver is set up, many are written in a mixture of php and python so setting them up is generally drag and drop with either minor configuration file edits or wizards. Many of them have sections that you can set up using a labeling/tagging system. Most of them allow you to have the ‘stories’ as private or draft where you have to actually click publish before people can view them. Some have user roles systems where you can limit viewing and even editing between different roles for sections.
Generally, once their setup is done, they are point and click to do everything.
Here’s a nice list of FOSS CMS’ (which includes Wordpress of course).
https://ghost.org/ would probably work pretty well for you.
There is also writefreely. It is fairly basic, but says it supports “publish[ing] to multiple blogs from one account”. Haven’t really used it, but it looks kinda cool imo
A static site generator (Hugo would be great for your needs) and host the files on a CDN like bunny.net. It costs $1/month for 100 GB transfer included and you pay 1 cent/GB above that. But I sincerely doubt a small personal website that’s mostly text will serve more than 100 GB/month.
Hosting on a CDN is amazing because they have dozens of redundant distribution points all over the world, can easily scale to traffic spikes, you never have to worry about consuming too much CPU or RAM or about security issues etc.
You can probably throw together a pretty simple wordpress website without much knowledge. Just keep it mostly out of the box, maybe change the theme.
Obsidian is awesome, and obsidian publish costs money but it’s very easy to use.
Grav.
I am currently using this to do exactly what you are doing. I moved from Ghost cause of many reasons. Can share links in PM if you want.
I’m sorry. I thought I had replied to this. Yes. That Grav.
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