So, today The Self-Hosting Blog got approved for monitisation via NitroPay. Which has got me thinking about where I would like to take the blog. I started the blog to be able to document my findings and giver back to the self-hosting community. When I was working on something that didn’t have much of a presence on Google, I would type up my notes as a tutorial to hopefully save someone else the headache that I went through. That was around 2 years go.

Recently, I have been pushing the blog onto something else. To create more of a community. I want to have a place (other than Reddit, which is toxic) for self-hosted enthusiasts to come together and talk about what they enjoy most. So I set up a Room in Matrix for The Self-Hosting Blog. We’ve had a few people join and the conversations are engaging and fun.

I also set up a weekly newsletter with the weeks’ roundup of interesting self-hosting articles that I have come across. We have around 50 members who recieve our newsletter at time of writing this! Which is pretty good!

Now for my complex, should I monetise the site? Obviously there are costs involved with the domain name and hosting. But I really don’t want to have to put ads on the site. It doesn’t sit well with me ethically. We’ve switched over to using Plausible.io so that we’re not tracking our users so personally. We’ve added Commento as our comments engine of choice. Having adverts on our site just doesn’t make sense.

I’d really appreciate some thoughts from the community. I’m quite happy to pay for the hosting myself, but how comfortable do you (my readers) feel about having adverts on the site?

Please let me know in the comments, or on Matrix!

Thanks!