Developer Blog
Run a datacenter at home?
That question popped into my head recently while I was playing around with DuckDNS.org - and I haven’t been able to shake it since.
DuckDNS is a free dynamic DNS service that maps a stable, easy-to-remember subdomain (like yourname.duckdns.org) to your home network’s public IP address. In plain English: even if your ISP keeps changing your IP address, you can still reliably access your home server from anywhere in the world.
I decided to give it a spin. Within minutes, I had a website running on a 10-year-old laptop that I power on every now and then. No fancy hardware. No cloud dashboard. Just a dusty old machine doing its thing.
The real surprise came when I tested the site from a remote desktop session on a server in Ireland. The page loaded fast. Really fast. From my home near Brussels to Dublin, latency barely touched 50 ms. Practically instant.
Even more impressive: my home internet connection is miles ahead of what it was a decade ago. With roughly 3 MB/s upstream and 10 MB/s downstream, the numbers are no longer laughable - they’re actually usable.
And that’s when the thought hit me.
Do We Still Need the Cloud… for Everything?
Thinking this through, it would be ridiculously easy to run some kind of server from home. Install Xampp, spin up Apache, MySQL, PHP, and suddenly you’re hosting dozens of WordPress sites from your basement.
Power outages? Hardly an issue. Around here, electricity goes down maybe once a year, for half an hour at most.
Hosting from home actually has some compelling advantages:
- It’s basically free (apart from the electricity a regular computer consumes).
- It’s scalable in the most literal way - need more storage? Plug in a 2 TB network drive.
- You own your data. No vague promises, no “trust us” cloud providers, no digital landlord.
Of course, it’s not perfect.
The biggest bottleneck is the upstream speed. That 3 MB/s means you have to be careful with uploads - especially images and media-heavy content. But even that problem has solutions. Automated image resizing and compression can go a long way.
The Full Stack… in One Installer
XAMPP is particularly interesting here. It doesn’t just give you a web server. You also get:
- a database server (MySQL),
- mail server functionality,
- and even FTP.
That’s pretty much everything you need to run an entire small business - locally.
And this is where nostalgia kicks in.
Back to the Future
Between 1998 and 2003, this was completely normal. Most of my customers ran their own servers. Websites lived under desks, in spare rooms, or in noisy back offices. And you know what? It worked. Most of the time.
The cloud didn’t really invent anything new. What it did bring was total dependence - and a hefty recurring cost.
Today, I’m paying around $3,000 per year for a fairly basic cloud server. And I'm paying some more for cloud storage (Apple Cloud and Google Workspace).
Which makes me wonder…
Maybe it’s time to stop renting someone else’s computer.
Maybe it’s time to reclaim a bit of that old-school independence.
I might not build a real datacenter in my basement - but honestly?
I’m starting to think I could get pretty close. 😄
AI is everywhere. That much is obvious.
But recently I realized something more uncomfortable: as an individual professional web designer, web developer, or web hoster, it has become nearly impossible to turn a passion for the web into a sustainable financial success story.
The End of the “Good Old Days”
If you’re thinking about starting a hosting business, building a career as a developer, or launching a web design or marketing consultancy agency, I honestly think you should pause and think twice. The golden era is over. Not fading - gone.
Look around:
- Need a server?
For less than €10 per month, you can deploy powerful VPS solutions across the globe. - Have an idea for an app or web application?
AI can now generate working code faster than a 200-person development team could 15 years ago. - Need a web designer?
WordPress alone ships with thousands of themes. In reality, you only need one solid Gutenberg-based theme to build almost any layout or design — often in minutes.
What used to require specialized knowledge, experience, and time has been productized, automated, and commoditized.
This Isn’t Theory — It’s My Reality
Just a few hours ago, I lived this firsthand.
- I spun up a Linux VPS and let Gemini guide me through the entire setup.
- I created complex automation scripts to resize and optimize images used on over 300 websites.
- I extended CKEditor templates with custom blocks for use in QuickerSite.
All of it was done in minutes - not hours.
These are tasks that once defined “expertise.” Tasks people used to bill for. Tasks that justified entire careers.
Now they’re table stakes.
So… Is the Web Dead?
Not quite.
The old web is dead:
the web where technical ability alone was enough, where knowing how to do something was the value.
But a new web is very much alive.
A web where:
- Execution is cheap
- Knowledge is abundant
- Tools are insanely powerful
- And differentiation no longer comes from building, but from thinking
Long Live the WWWeb
The web isn’t disappearing — it’s mutating.
The winners won’t be the ones who know how to spin up servers, write CRUD apps, or design yet another landing page. Those skills are becoming commodities.
The winners will be the ones who:
- Ask better questions
- Understand users deeply
- Combine creativity, strategy, and judgment
- Use AI as leverage, not competition
The WWWeb is dead.
Long live the WWWeb.
This website is nothing special. It looks like a fresh install of aspLite, my developer framework for Classic ASP/VBScript.
However, this is a WordPress. aspLite is not loaded via an iFrame or so. No, the aspLite demo is loaded in a block Custom HTML in WordPress. That block includes all JavaScript and CSS dependecies.
The most interesting part of this site therefore is: its web.config! I attach it to this post. This web.config serves both PHP (8.3), .NET (2.0 and 4.0) and Classic ASP/VBScript. I'm sure I could add support for Node.js and Ruby On Rails as well. But who needs all this?
IIS is - all in all - a very flexible and powerful web server.
Imagine it’s three years from now. Your business has evolved, and you’ve just invested in a stunning new brand identity. You have a new color palette, updated typography, and a sleek, modern aesthetic.
Now comes the moment of truth: How hard will it be to apply that new look to your existing website?
In one scenario, it takes ten minutes. In the other, it takes ten days of manual clicking and "cleaning up" old pages. The difference lies in a fundamental architectural choice: Block-level styling versus Template-driven design.
The Core Difference: Granular vs. Structural
As far as web design - colors, backgrounds, spacing, opacity, gradients, shadows, widths, and heights - is concerned, there is a major difference between visual page builders and block-editors (like WordPress tends to be) and the more classic CMS editors where content and design are 100% split up.
In WordPress, every block comes with various style settings. A paragraph, a group, a cover, columns - they all store style-related settings along with the content. Some styling settings relate to the theme or the plugins that are activated. Some specific features, like AoS (Animate on Scroll), are set at the block level. This "sticky" relationship between style and content is exactly why it isn’t always obvious or easy to swap themes or replace plugins in WordPress without breaking things.
In QuickerSite, however, most design elements reside strictly in the templates. If you replace the template, the entire web design changes instantly—including the width, color, background, and the "look and feel" of every element.
1. The WordPress Philosophy: The Artist’s Canvas
The block-editor model (Gutenberg) treats every page like a unique canvas.
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The Advantage: Creative empowerment. You have the freedom to make a specific landing page look entirely different from the rest of your site without touching a line of code.
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The Nuance: While modern WordPress is introducing "Global Styles" to help manage this, the system still encourages "local" overrides.
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The Risk (Design Debt): When you set a specific button to #FF5733 (Orange) at the block level, that color is now hard-coded into your database for that page. If you change your brand color to Blue later, that orange button stays orange. Over hundreds of pages, this creates "Design Debt" - a massive cleanup job waiting to happen.
2. The QuickerSite Philosophy: The Architect’s Blueprint
The template-centric model treats content like water and the template like a glass.
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The Advantage: Unbreakable consistency. You can pour your content into a different "glass" (template), and it takes the new shape instantly.
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The Scalability: This is "client-proof" design. Because the styles are locked in the template, a content editor cannot accidentally change a font to Comic Sans or use an off-brand shade of red on a new blog post.
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The Efficiency: Global updates are truly global. Change the "padding" variable once in the template, and every section on every page of your site updates in a millisecond.
Which Path Should You Choose?
Neither approach is "wrong," but they serve different masters. To help you decide, consider which of these personas fits your project:
| Feature | The "Creative Artist" (WordPress) | The "Strategic Architect" (QuickerSite) |
| Best For | Unique landing pages, creative portfolios, and DIY designers. | Business sites, large directories, and brand-heavy projects. |
| Maintenance | High. Requires manual checks during updates or rebrands. | Low. Design is governed by a central "source of truth." |
| Flexibility | Infinite. Every block can be its own snowflake. | Standardized. Excellence through consistency. |
| Long-term Cost | Higher (due to "Design Debt" cleanup). | Lower (design and content stay separated). |
Final Thoughts: Freedom vs. Order
At this point, you might still be unsure which you prefer - and that’s natural.
If you view a website as a collection of unique artistic expressions, the WordPress block-level approach is a playground of opportunity. But if you view a website as a scalable business asset that must remain lean, consistent, and easy to overhaul, the QuickerSite template-first approach is the superior engine.
One gives you the power to change everything; the other gives you the power to keep everything the same.
I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time, and I finally got around to it. I set up a sample site using a Bootstrap 5.3 template. It may not be the most visually striking design, but it does what it’s supposed to do - and it works well. All it took was a bit of custom ASP/VBScript in QS to get the navigation up and running.
I’ve never really understood why Bootstrap never introduced its own CMS. Mobirise did, but it never quite made sense as a CMS. Other platforms offer Bootstrap-based templates, but a dedicated CMS built entirely around Bootstrap’s layout system—its components, forms, utilities, and helpers—could have been a genuinely strong alternative to WordPress.
