My own domain, my own server, my own website and email, measured against Derek Sivers’s guide. What I’ve done, when I did it, and what’s next.
“Tech independence is not depending on any particular company or software.”Derek Sivers, Tech Independence
Derek wrote a step-by-step guide to owning your own corner of the internet: your own domain, a small server you rent, a plain website, your own email, your own files, contacts and calendar. If a company changes its prices or goes away, you move to another server in an hour and carry on.
When I first read it years ago I thought, “Must be nice.” Derek is an uber-nerd literal hobbit in the woods of New Zealand who built a multimillion dollar software company after teaching himself how to code. I wrote more about him here.
But as time has gone on I’ve felt more and more frustrated with the status quo. I want to take back control of my life online and not feel locked into any platforms or services.
In my first Saturday essay, Handmake Your Life, I wrote: “I've admired Derek Sivers for years, especially his crazy idea of tech independence, and this is the first time in my life I feel equipped to really build it for myself. My own server. My own email list. And if I can do it, you can too.”
And I mean it. I’m working through it and I created this page to publicly track it all. One, so you can see what I’m doing and two, so you can do it too.
This page keeps score honestly, with the date I did each step, and as I go I’ll add how I did it, so you can follow along.
I am also going to create more resources for you over time. I’m adding a quiz in the top right so you can see where you are at and I will send you resources and check back in with you over time to see how I can help you out.
Register a domain name of your own, so your address never belongs to a company.
I registered travishellstrom.com on December 17, 2006. For years it sat with Squarespace Domains. In 2026 I moved it to Cloudflare, which charges what the registry charges, with no markup.
Point your domain’s nameservers somewhere you control, so you decide where every address goes.
On February 22, 2026, my domain’s DNS moved to Cloudflare. Now I can point any part of travishellstrom.com at any server, in minutes.
Rent a small private server where you have full control (“root”). Five dollars a month is enough.
On February 20, 2026, my friend Evan spent the day with me setting up a small server on DigitalOcean. My AI assistant, Sky, has lived on it ever since, and so does this website. The story is on Building Sky.
The story: The day Evan and I set it up, with the whole first conversation, is in Building Sky: Day one →
Make an SSH key and log in to your server yourself. The point is to know how, not to have somebody do it for you.
I log in to my own server from the terminal myself, with ssh.
Add private, encrypted storage to your server and upload your documents to it, so your files don’t live in someone else’s cloud.
Not yet. My own files still live with the big cloud companies.
Make your website out of plain HTML files you can read and change yourself, not a platform or page builder.
On September 16, 2026, this site went live: plain web pages, no platform, on my own server. Since then I’ve brought home more than a thousand pages of old writing. On October 6, 2026, moving day, travishellstrom.com itself came home, with every old link still working, and I cancelled Squarespace.
The story: From the first page to moving day, with screenshots and a day-by-day log, on Evolution →
Put files you want to share in a public folder on your site, instead of Dropbox and the like.
Since September 23, 2026, my free books, my master’s thesis, workbooks and recordings are shared straight from this site, for example my thesis and Crafting Your Purpose.
Have an email address at your own domain, so you can never get stuck with one email company.
Since February 22, 2026, mail to addresses at travishellstrom.com reaches me through Cloudflare. The address is mine, so I can move the inbox behind it any time.
Run your own mail server, so you can read your email from any app on any device, and send it through a small sending service.
Not yet. My inbox still lives at a big email company.
Not in Derek’s guide, but in its spirit: he keeps his own private email list instead of renting one.
The subscribe form on this site has saved to my own list, on my own server, since the site launched. A sending service delivers the Saturday email, but the list of readers is mine.
The story: Why I built my own newsletter instead of using a platform is in my first Saturday essay, Handmake Your Life →
Keep your contacts and calendar on your own server and sync them to your phone, instead of Google or Apple’s cloud.
Sky set up the server side. My phone isn’t connected to it yet.
Derek reads and writes his email on the server itself, with a program called mutt. An extra, for the curious.
Maybe one day, just for fun.
Patch and upgrade your server now and then. It takes a minute.
Sky has kept the server patched and watched since day one. The part still to learn is doing it myself.
The story: What keeps the server running, and the times it fell over, is in Building Sky: What broke →
Short how-tos, with the tools I used: Cloudflare, DigitalOcean and Ubuntu. Derek’s guide does the same with Porkbun, Vultr and OpenBSD, with every click. The whole guide is at sive.rs/ti. The story of how this website came home is on Evolution, and my AI assistant’s is on Building Sky.
Cost: $10 a year for a .com at Cloudflare, which charges what the registry charges, and the same to renew.
Cost: Free.
graham.ns.cloudflare.com. At your registrar, replace the old nameservers with those two. (If you bought your domain at Cloudflare, this is already done.)yourdomain.com or blog.yourdomain.com, at a server’s IP address.Cost: About $4 to $12 a month for a small server (DigitalOcean’s start at $4). Mine is bigger, so I pay more.
Cost: Free.
ssh-keygen -t ed25519 and press Enter at each question. (A passphrase is optional; it protects the key if your computer is stolen.)cat ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub and copy the one line it prints. It starts with ssh-ed25519. The file next to it without .pub is your private key: it never leaves your computer.ssh root@YOUR-SERVER-IP. The first time, it asks if you trust the server; type yes.exit to leave.Cost: Free.
/var/www/yoursite/. Make a folder in it for files: mkdir -p /var/www/yoursite/downloads.scp myfile.pdf root@yourdomain.com:/var/www/yoursite/downloads/. For a whole folder, rsync -avz myfolder root@yourdomain.com:/var/www/yoursite/downloads/.https://yourdomain.com/downloads/myfile.pdf. No Dropbox needed.Cost: Free with Cloudflare Email Routing, into Gmail (also free).
you@yourdomain.com, and send it to that destination. A catch-all can send everything else at your domain there too.Cost: Free.
ssh root@YOUR-SERVER-IP.apt update to fetch the list of updates, then apt upgrade and answer y to install them./var/run/reboot-required exists (check with ls /var/run/reboot-required), type reboot, wait a minute and log back in.apt install unattended-upgrades, then dpkg-reconfigure -plow unattended-upgrades and answer Yes.“Media silence creates a vacuum, which your own thoughts expand to fill.”Derek Sivers, Offline 23 hours a day
Derek lives in the woods of New Zealand, in a home with no internet or phone service, and goes online about an hour a day. He hosts his own website and email on a small server he rents, and has read his email with mutt for twenty years. His guide walks you through every step. I’m following it, and keeping score in public.
Follow along
One essay a week, every Saturday morning. Reply with your questions.