Speedking 2.0: no longer .local, now it's .ing
Published at 2026-03-25T01:56:37-05:00
Over the course of the past two months, I decided to finally upgrade from the old Raspberry Pi 3 I've been using since 2019 as a LAN-only server for a few things (mostly Gitea, but a few other smaller things as well) to something more substantial. The Pi still works, but it was showing its age and due to tech in general getting more expensive I decided to get something better to run it on before prices spiral out of control even more. Since it's a fair amount better than what I was using previously, I figured "why not toss this whole thing online" and here we are.
It's certainly not going to be a perfect website; it's not going to have 100% uptime (the internet here drops at least twice a week for 10 minutes, not counting the maintenance I'll be doing), it's not going to be the most performant, its not going to look super fancy with every new framework under the sun, it's not going to be ultra formal to double as a CV, and in the greater scope of internet time it'll probably be rather ephemeral. But it's mine and I'm pleased with it.
Why does this exist?
Why not?
How is this site even made?
If we're talking about the pages you're viewing, this was entirely written in Gemtext for the Gemini protocol. It's then converted into HTML format via Gemtexter.
If you would like to know more about Gemini as a protocol
Link to Gemtexter (hosted on Codeberg)
What is this site hosted on?
It's hosted on a repurposed Lenovo ThinkCentre I bought off of eBay, which is then tunneled through a VPS to the broader internet.
Why this specific piece of hardware?
It was cheap (a little over 100 USD), capable and easy to source parts for if needed. My original choices were actually Intel NUC based devices, but why spend 150+ for one of those when I could get something about as powerful for less while also recycling some hardware?
Why the name "Speedking"?
It's a JoJo's Bizarre Adventure (part 8) reference. I originally used this as the hostname on the Raspberry Pi 3 I used from 2019 to 2026 as a LAN-only server for git and a few other things. Checked Porkbun for domain names and this was available.
Why go through all the trouble of self-hosting and tunneling? Why not just use a VPS?
I could have done it all on the VPS, yeah. Could have just setup everything via Uberspace, or if we want something more "retro" and simple to work with Neocities. But I had a few reasons for going this route.
- Primarily, it's a learning experience.
- Self-hosting gives me far more control over what I can do with everything here.
- It's "cheaper" (it's actually not since I'm still paying for a VPS here)
- Since it's being self-hosted on my own hardware, I can effectively upgrade storage/RAM whenever (lmao good luck with parts being expensive as they are)
- I have a few spare laptop drives I can use for on-site backups of everything here (not like the backup files would be particularly big)
Uberspace website
Neocities website
So...what are you actually going to do with this?
I dunno. Mostly just as a blog or something really. I do have a few ideas tossed around that could be a thing later on:
- Single user fediverse instance to act as some sort of social media (as I have never used anything like twitter and the like)
- A public IRC server if I desire. I already setup Ergo when I still used the Raspberry Pi just to see how simple it is to get going, but I cannot imagine anyone who comes across this wanting to use IRC for communication.
Otherwise who knows. I guess we'll see where things go from here.