Building My Own Little Corner of the Internet Again — For the First Time Since 2010

From .CO.CC domains, early YouTube, and mining imaginary internet money to finally building something I intend to keep forever.

Well, here we are. It's 2026, and somehow I've found myself doing something I haven't seriously attempted in at least 16 years: building my own personal website, entirely for free.

And let me tell you something. It's bringing back some memories.

I'm talking about the old internet. Not the polished, corporate, algorithm-driven, subscription-infested monstrosity we've all become accustomed to. I'm talking about the internet where you could spend six hours trying to figure out how to put a picture on a webpage, accidentally break the entire thing, and somehow feel like you'd accomplished something extraordinary when you finally got it working.

The internet where everybody had a username that sounded like a rejected Xbox Live gamertag, every other website had a visitor counter, and a poorly animated GIF of a flaming skull was considered the absolute pinnacle of web design.

I'm talking about the Wild West of the internet.

Back when YouTube was still relatively new, people uploaded videos because they felt like it, and not because they were trying to manipulate an algorithm into financing their third Lamborghini.

Back when Bitcoin was some obscure internet nerd experiment that sounded like a complete joke.

Hell, I remember the days when you could mine Bitcoin using an ordinary computer. Just let the thing sit there crunching numbers and generating what was essentially magical internet Monopoly money.

Imagine trying to explain that to somebody today.

"Yeah, I used to let my computer generate imaginary money that eventually became worth an absolutely ridiculous amount."

"Oh, cool! Are you a millionaire?"

"No. Absolutely not. I was a teenager, and my financial priorities were substantially different."

Let's just say that when I was in high school, the concept of using Bitcoin to buy weed on Silk Road seemed considerably more interesting than the idea of saving it for retirement.

Phenomenal financial foresight, I know.

We're talking about an era when somebody famously spent 10,000 Bitcoin on two pizzas in 2010. A transaction that, in retrospect, might be the most expensive case of the munchies in human history.

And to think that something people once treated like worthless imaginary internet tokens would eventually trade for over $100,000 apiece.

Meanwhile, I was concerned with whether I could get a website running without paying a single penny.

Which brings me to another relic of that era.

Anybody remember .CO.CC?

Oh, man.

If you remember .CO.CC websites, there's a pretty good chance you remember an entirely different internet.

For anybody unfamiliar, .CO.CC was a service that allowed you to register a free website address. Technically, these were subdomains rather than independently registered top-level domains, but to a teenager with no money and a desire to create something on the internet, that distinction wasn't particularly important.

What mattered was that you could get something like:

myridiculouslyawesomewebsite.co.cc

For the unbeatable price of absolutely nothing.

Zero dollars.

No credit card.

No monthly subscription.

No fourteen-day free trial that secretly required your mother's banking information.

Just a free little address somewhere in the enormous digital wilderness.

Of course, getting the address was only the beginning.

You still needed somewhere to host the actual website.

And that's where the fun started.

Building a free website back then was practically an engineering degree

People today have absolutely no idea how much nonsense you sometimes had to go through just to get a basic website online.

First, you'd have to find a free web host that didn't look like it was being operated from somebody's basement using a stolen Dell OptiPlex.

Then you'd register your .CO.CC address.

Then you'd log into some control panel that looked like it had been designed in Microsoft Paint.

Then came the genuinely exciting part: figuring out how to make your fancy new domain actually point toward your website.

Nameservers.

DNS settings.

A records.

CNAME records.

What the hell was any of this?

I just wanted to put some words and pictures on the internet, and suddenly I'm performing some kind of digital witchcraft.

You'd copy some mysterious-looking nameserver address from your hosting provider, paste it into the .CO.CC control panel, save everything, and then stare at your browser for the next hour wondering whether you'd done something wrong.

Sometimes it worked.

Sometimes it didn't.

Sometimes it worked yesterday and mysteriously stopped working today.

Then you'd have to figure out how to upload your actual files.

HTML files, images, directories, FTP clients, index pages, broken links, missing pictures, and that unforgettable moment when you realized that index.html wasn't just some random file name.

It was the difference between having a functioning website and having a completely useless directory of files.

And if you made a mistake?

Congratulations. Your website now displays a broken image icon, an error message, or absolutely nothing.

But when it finally worked?

When you typed that ridiculous little .CO.CC address into your browser and your very own website appeared?

That was genuinely exciting.

You'd made something.

It wasn't a Facebook profile. It wasn't somebody else's platform. It wasn't a template-based page on some social media service.

It was your own little corner of the internet.

Sure, it probably looked terrible.

But it was your terrible website.

And there was something genuinely special about that.

Somewhere along the way, the internet changed

Over the years, the internet gradually became something very different from what I remember.

Websites became platforms. Platforms became corporations. Corporations became advertising machines.

Everything started revolving around subscriptions, engagement, monetization, content creators, influencers, search engine optimization, and algorithms that apparently require a PhD in psychological manipulation to understand.

Want to publish your thoughts?

Create an account.

Want people to see them?

Build an audience.

Want to keep your audience?

Post constantly.

Want to host your own material?

That'll be $14.99 a month, please.

And don't forget the premium package!

Somewhere along the way, simply having your own website started feeling almost old-fashioned.

And maybe that's exactly why I'm interested in doing it again.

I don't necessarily want to build the next Facebook.

I don't want to become some internet celebrity.

I don't need to turn every passing thought into a monetized business opportunity.

Sometimes I just want a place where I can publish something because I think it's interesting, funny, useful, ridiculous, or worth remembering.

A place where I can talk about technology, video games, bizarre things I discover, old memories, personal projects, and whatever else happens to occupy my brain.

Without having to worry about whether a social media algorithm considers my thoughts sufficiently engaging to show them to fourteen people.

I just want my own website again.

So here I am, back at it in 2026

And wouldn't you know it, I've decided to try building the entire thing for free again.

Apparently some things never change.

This time, however, I'm approaching things a little differently.

I'm using a program called Publii to create and manage my website locally on my own computer, and I'm working on getting everything published through Cloudflare Pages.

The general idea is pretty simple.

I create my posts, organize my pictures, customize the website, and generate the files needed to publish everything online.

Unlike those old days of hunting down some questionable free web hosting service, modern static website hosting gives me a way to publish a reasonably sophisticated website without necessarily paying a recurring hosting bill.

Of course, that doesn't mean the process has been effortless.

Far from it.

I've already been digging through dashboards, configuring things, figuring out how publishing works, learning about website structure, and trying to understand how all the different pieces fit together.

And in some strange way, it feels exactly like being back in 2010.

Except now I'm older, supposedly wiser, and somehow still staring at a computer screen thinking:

"What the hell am I supposed to click next?"

The technology has improved considerably.

My ability to become irritated by technology has remained remarkably consistent.

But there's a major difference between what I was doing back then and what I'm doing now.

This time, I'm building something I intend to keep

When I was younger, a website was just something fun to mess around with.

I'd create something, customize it, experiment with it, maybe get bored with it, and eventually move on.

And like so many things from the early internet, those old websites disappeared.

Free hosting services shut down.

Domains expired.

Companies disappeared.

Files got lost on old hard drives.

Computers were replaced.

Entire communities vanished practically overnight.

Years of people's creativity, discussions, pictures, guides, and personal projects were wiped off the internet like they had never existed.

And if there's one thing I've come to appreciate as I've gotten older, it's just how easily digital history can disappear.

That's something I want to avoid this time.

I want this website to become a permanent part of my life.

Not just some temporary project that I get excited about for two weeks before forgetting it exists.

I want something I can steadily build over the years.

Something that grows alongside my interests, hobbies, experiences, and whatever strange projects I happen to get involved with.

I might publish ten things one month and nothing the next.

I might spend a weekend writing about a video game that came out twenty-five years ago.

I might document a project, share something useful, write a ridiculously long rant, or post pictures of something interesting I stumbled across.

That's the beauty of having your own website.

It doesn't need to follow somebody else's schedule.

It doesn't need to have a particular theme every single day.

It doesn't need to impress anybody.

It just needs to exist, and gradually become a collection of things that matter to me.

And this time, I'm taking backups seriously

Here's another important lesson that took about sixteen years to sink in.

Never trust the continued existence of something you've spent hundreds of hours creating to one company, one computer, or one website address.

That goes double for anything advertised as free.

Back in the .CO.CC days, losing access to your hosting provider could mean losing everything.

And while modern technology has made websites considerably easier to manage, the fundamental risks haven't disappeared.

Computers still fail.

Hard drives still die.

Companies still shut down.

Free services still change their terms.

And domain names still expire.

So this time, I want to build everything with portability and preservation in mind.

One of the things I particularly like about Publii is that my website's working content is managed locally.

I'm not creating every article inside some mysterious proprietary online platform and simply hoping the company never disappears.

I can maintain copies of my website project, including the posts, images, configuration, and other important files.

I can generate the finished static website files.

I can keep separate backups.

I can put those backups on an external hard drive, keep additional copies in cloud storage, and periodically archive the entire project into ZIP files.

And perhaps most importantly, I can test those backups instead of merely assuming they're going to work when I need them.

I want to be able to look back five or ten years from now and know that all the things I've created are still available to me.

If I buy a new computer, I want to transfer my website over.

If my current computer dies, I want to restore my work.

If I decide to reorganize everything, I want the freedom to do that.

And if Cloudflare, or whatever hosting service I happen to be using at the time, stops being the right choice, I want the option to publish the website somewhere else.

The same goes for domain names.

If I eventually decide to purchase a proper custom domain, I'd like to be able to make that transition without rebuilding years of content from scratch.

The domain is supposed to be the address where people find my website.

It shouldn't be the thing holding my entire website hostage.

Of course, moving domains can still require updating links, search engine information, and redirects. There's no magical guarantee that changing an address won't create some headaches.

But those should be manageable technical problems, not disasters that result in years of work being lost.

I want to separate the content I've created from the particular services I happen to use to publish it.

My website should belong to me, regardless of what computer I'm using, what company hosts it, or what address people type into their browsers.

And that's probably the biggest philosophical difference between building a website in 2010 and building one in 2026.

Back then, I was just trying to figure out how to make it work.

Now, I'm thinking about how to make it last.

I want to do this properly, even if it's just a hobby

That's another thing I want to emphasize.

Just because I'm building something for free doesn't mean I want it to look or function like something thrown together in twenty minutes.

I want to take some pride in it.

I want to organize things sensibly.

I want the articles to be readable.

I want the photographs and other media to be properly managed.

I want the site to work on phones and computers.

I want to make sure I'm not losing images because I renamed a folder or moved something on my desktop.

I want to develop a sensible routine for publishing, maintaining, and backing up my work.

And if I ever decide to expand the website, upgrade the domain, move hosting providers, or build something considerably bigger, I want the foundation to already be there.

There's no reason a personal hobby website can't be maintained with the same care and organization as a professional project.

That doesn't mean I intend to turn this into a second full-time job.

I already have one of those, and it takes up quite enough of my existence.

What I want is something enjoyable that I can continue working on without constantly worrying about whether some technical disaster is going to erase everything I've accomplished.

The whole point is to make the maintenance manageable enough that I'll still enjoy doing it years from now.

Maybe this is just nostalgia. Maybe it's something more.

There's something almost comforting about going back to building a personal website after all these years.

The internet felt like such an enormous place when I was younger.

Every day you could stumble across somebody's bizarre little homepage, discover some obscure community, find an incredible piece of software, or waste an entire evening exploring websites that probably hadn't been updated since 2003.

It was messy.

It was disorganized.

It was occasionally dangerous.

And a frankly alarming percentage of it featured Comic Sans.

But it was interesting.

It felt like a place where ordinary people could create something simply because they wanted to.

Not everything had to be a business.

Not every website needed advertisers.

Not every piece of content needed a thumbnail featuring somebody with their mouth wide open and a giant red arrow pointing at absolutely nothing.

Sometimes people just made things.

And I miss that.

Maybe building my own little website again is my way of bringing back a tiny piece of that internet.

A place where I can create, experiment, document, and share things on my own terms.

Something I can look back on years from now and actually feel proud of.

Will it become something enormous?

Probably not.

Will millions of people visit it?

Highly doubtful.

Will I occasionally spend four hours fixing something that should have taken five minutes?

Almost certainly.

But at least this time, I intend to make sure those four hours of suffering are backed up in three different locations.

Here's to starting over

So, after roughly sixteen years, I'm officially returning to the wonderful, occasionally infuriating world of maintaining my own website.

Only this time, I'm not a teenager registering some ridiculous .CO.CC address, experimenting with free hosting, and wondering whether imaginary internet money can buy me something entertaining.

I'm an adult registering accounts with hosting services, learning how static websites work, worrying about data preservation, and spending an embarrassing amount of time figuring out the proper way to organize image files.

Look at me. All grown up.

The teenage version of myself would probably be disappointed that I didn't hold onto a few thousand Bitcoin.

The adult version of myself is mostly concerned about having a reliable backup strategy.

Funny how priorities change.

But in all seriousness, I'm excited about this.

It's been a lot of learning, experimenting, troubleshooting, and effort just to get the foundation of this thing put together.

And I haven't even scratched the surface of everything I'd eventually like to do with it.

This is only the beginning.

I'd like to think that someday, years down the road, I'll be able to browse through hundreds of old posts, pictures, projects, stories, and random discoveries and appreciate just how much I've accumulated.

Not because some company preserved it for me.

Not because an algorithm decided it was worth keeping.

But because I took the time to create it, organize it, and make sure it survived.

And if I ever have to move everything to a different computer, a different web host, or an entirely different domain, I want to be able to do exactly that.

Pack it up. Back it up. Move it over. Keep going.

No starting from scratch.

No losing years of work.

No reliving the tragic disappearance of my glorious .CO.CC empire.

Just one continuously evolving little corner of the internet that I can genuinely call my own.

Here's to the old internet, to making something for the hell of it, and to finally being smart enough to back the damn thing up.

And who knows?

Maybe sixteen years from now, I'll be writing another one of these articles, reminiscing about how primitive the internet was back in 2026.

Hopefully, this time, I'll still have the original website to publish it on.