TypeDock Demo

Self-Hosting on a $5 Server

Demo Author

A practical setup for hosting your site on cheap shared infrastructure — without giving up on craft.

Most of the people I admire on the web run their sites on infrastructure that costs less than a sandwich. Here is the setup I use, in case it is useful to anyone else.

What you need

  • A shared host with PHP 8.2 or newer (Sakura, XServer, ConoHa, or any commodity Linux box).

  • SQLite — already shipped with PHP, no extra server to run.

  • A domain name. About $12 a year.

  • Maybe 30 minutes of patience for the first deploy.

Setup

Upload the release zip to the host, point the document root at public/, and visit the site once. The installer will create a SQLite database, run the migrations, and ask you to choose an admin password.

# unzip the release
unzip typedock-1.0.0.zip
mv typedock-1.0.0/* .

# point your DocumentRoot at public/
# then visit https://yourdomain.example/install.php

If your host gives you SSH, you can run the installer from the command line instead:

php cli/install.php
php cli/seed.php   # optional sample content

Why bother

Because the alternative is paying $30 a month for a hosted CMS that will eventually shut down, get acquired, change its pricing, or quietly start using your writing to train someone's model. A $5 server you understand is worth a great deal more than a $300 service you do not.

Own your words. Own the database that holds them.