No doubt the idea of complete control of a blog at $10 a year would be appealing for many. And no doubt many would share the same concerns as I do. During the planning phase, some of the definitive downgrades I was able to come to terms with, some of the regained controls I was able to make use of, and the saved cost I was ready to file under an existing list of subscriptions. I believe there are three major concerns most bloggers may have: uptime, support, and technical debt to AI.

Uptime is always an element a residential account can never win. Hosting services are bound to have more rigid power and network. The unexpected downtime, such as from power and/or network, is out of bounds for me. The emphasis is on ME, my particular case. I can use a UPS for power, but I cannot prepare for network outages — it’s a Korean ISP problem. Some may have the liberty to opt for Starlink or LTE/5G backup. I opted not to. A severe weather event might cause an outage for a few hours, but Cloudflare will serve pages during those times, albeit up to a month old. Paying for a redundancy line used only for a few hours a year seemed excessive. Scheduled downtime is the easier half. On my Linux box, it comes from a monthly cold backup, maybe a few minutes at most. I know when it is scheduled for and I know when it occurs. That’s how I wired it all up.

The tech support from a paid service is not a silver bullet either. During the last emergency my hosting provider had, their lines were saturated until the day I migrated off, and well deservedly so. The common idea that tech support from a hosting service will be readily available is an unfounded one. Whether they opt to be helpful once reached is a separate question. In my anecdotal experience, I had gone through several hosting services, and one of them refused to answer a question about the PHP version on my plan; their customer support redirected me to take it up with the web developer, which in this case was myself. When I finally asked for the system spec, they relented. The hiccup cost me an additional $40, and the fault was found to be PHP at the theme level, as I had originally suspected from get-go.

Hosting services are more like plumbers for a household. If you know how to fix a sink, you can do it yourself. If you only know you have a leak, you call them and pay for professional service. What they won’t do is answer general bathroom queries, let alone sell you the parts to fix the sink yourself. They often advertise or sell “customer support” as part of the package or as an add-on, but that support is limited to what they rent you — plumbers who also rent out portable toilets, and will service the rental only.

The technical debt is the only axis I cannot comfortably argue is hedged properly. I wrote most of the expenses off as pre-existing: AI for vibe coding, Linux box for home lab. There is one guideline I can offer to minimize the dependency. Don’t let AI do all the work for you without proper documentation. If you want a migration done, you plan it ahead. It has to be solid enough that another AI can take over any time, because that is what keeps the debt from coming due later. If you have a self-hosting blog, have the AI write up a spec sheet of what it did, almost like a pilot’s handbook in the cockpit. In my particular case, I no longer have to fly blind when something goes down, and I think that was reason enough to migrate with assistance from AI.