Why I Self Host My Poetry

July 04, 2026 15:42:52 ADT

I recently published nine poems to this website, and have a tenth that is in progress. I have a few reasons for why this body of poetry is appearing on this website now, with date and time stamps spanning all the way back to 2010. Originally, I hosted my poetry on another website, one which I shall not name. I even had a paid account on the website, and for many years, this worked well. In my view, I could share my poetry with whomever I pleased, occasionally, I’d get comments and feedback, and all was well.

Until it wasn’t. I recently discovered when trying to share one of my poems with a friend that this website had it locked away behind a login wall. I immediately checked my account settings. There was a setting that said to only permit logged in users to read my poems. It was not checked. And I never would have checked this either. To me, this defeats much of the purpose of hosting poetry online. While I am much more secretive with my prose, I want to disseminate my poetry far and wide. This made it so that even Google or other search engines could not index my work.

Moreover, this website depended on social features. Not included, depended. I’m not opposed to communities. I’m a part of a few myself and run a poetry community on Libera IRC. What I object to is social interaction being a form of currency for publishing. Free accounts were required to comment on other poems before they could post their own. I’ve grown less fond of social features over the years, and honestly would simply disable them. That is why I made the promise on this blog that there are and never will be any comments, ever. Given this dynamic, I assumed that simply opting out of or turning off comments for a given poem was probably not possible. This would also be unfair to free accounts needing to meet their comment quota in order to publish.

I opened a support ticket. I explained that my poems were not accessible to the general public, that I never enabled such a setting, and my account shows that the appropriate setting was never enabled. I waited for a response. To their credit, the response came more quickly than they said it would. They said a response would take 24 to 48 hours, and I got one in about four. That said, I wish they had taken longer, as all the response said was to toggle the setting in my account, and then the ticket was closed without waiting for any follow-up to see if this actually worked.

At that point, I had had enough. I migrated my content to here and requested account closure. Since the website had a paid account from me, which included personal details like name, date of birth, and potentially past payment information as well, I requested that the 30 day waiting period for account deletion be waived and that all data about me be deleted to the maximum extent legally possible.

Maintaining my writing here offers several benefits, including the following:

• This is my space. I choose what goes here and what doesn’t.
• No social “features”.
• Other websites can disappear tomorrow, with no opportunity to recover my work. This may disappear, but it has several backups which means I could restore my writing elsewhere.
• This hosting is actually cheaper than what I would have been paying with the other website, and is far more versatile. This is not a poem after all, yet I can host it here.
• No login is required for people or web crawlers to view and read content.

Overall, I think this is the best decision for my poetry. The last thing I need to worry about right now is fighting with a third party web host about whether or not my work should be accessible to the general public.