If you're reading this, it means that my move to self-hosting my website has gone more-or-less according to plan!
I've been paying a reasonable amount to Linode for many years now to run a server in New York on which to host this site. It's not a lot of money (US$12 a month, if you're really interested), but since this site is now merely a hobby and nothing at all to do with earning an income, it didn't seem to be a good idea to keep shelling out the dollars for it when I have a loft full of spare PCs, servers and laptops (most definitely in the geriatric category, but all capable of running a decent 64-bit Linux distro in 8GB RAM) that could be tasked to do the job for free instead.
With the site hosted in my loft, I had to pay US$29 to No-IP for a dynamic DNS service: it means my domain name now dynamically resolves to whatever IP address my ISP assigns me from time to time. But that's US$29 per year... so, by my calculations, I've just saved myself around US$100 a year. Which isn't a lot, but we retired folk have to save money wherever we can!
Of course, self-hosting my website means that if the cat chews through the power cable to the relevant server, you won't be able to reach the website (and the cat is probably dead). Not the sort of thing that generally happens with Linode-hosted servers, I would suggest. But these are the risks you take by moving things into your own home from a dedicated data centre 🙂 Practically, it means that if you ever visit this site in the future and find it unavailable, give it an hour or two and try again: I'm probably just dusting down a frizzled cat or two until normal service can be resumed!