The Boring Internet is Wonderful, but it's Kinda a Lot of Work
·
The Boring Internet is a nice rah rah post about using old internet technologies. This is my response to it.
Microsoft Exchange
Something we used to do in the early 2000's was host from home. You'd load up your servers on an old Dell PC and point DNS at your IP. A million years ago, I happened to get a bunch of Microsoft server licenses. I went ham and installed everything: Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, IIS, the works. Then one day there was a really bad storm that knocked the power out at my house. The Exchange server happened to be in the middle of indexing, and I lost a lot of email from family and friends. But it wasn't worth the effort to restore.
Then ISPs started blocking port 80. You had to do the work-around with dynamic DNS. Over time it just became a lot of effort. Editing config files, trying to understand all the quirky Windows UIs. Keeping the server up to date. Eventually I decided to stop hosting from home.
Self-Hosting on a VPS
I ran my own email server on Digital Ocean and self-hosted my websites with Mail-in-a-box. For the most part, it was pretty low touch. But those upgrades between Ubuntu versions were rough. The thing with Mail-in-a-box is that if you use all the features (i.e. Nextcloud), and if you have more than one user (I had my whole family on board), the costs start to go up. It was going to end up costing me a lot to keep up with the storage needs of the family. I finally got tired of being tech support and devops, so I took it all down, moved to Gmail like everyone else and started hosting on GitHub pages.
Application Hosting
But that left me wanting more from my websites. I vibe coded up a Next.js application and slid on over to Vercel. Now I live in fear of making it on Hacker News. I'm basically spending more time and money maintaining my websites than I ever have before. I'm paying for a SQLite database for crying out loud. It's a freaking file. They just make it so easy.
The Boring Internet is Kinda a Lot of Work
The point of all this rambling is that doing it The Old Way is great and nostalgic, but it also takes a lot of effort to keep it all going. And with every innovation there is an even higher financial cost. But Godier's right that the protocols are still there. SMTP didn't go anywhere, nobody took DNS public, the boring internet is humming along just fine.
What the essay doesn't quite say is that the cost of being a small participant on those protocols has quietly gone up. Running an MX record in 2003 meant your server was a peer on the network. Running one in 2026 means begging Gmail to like you so they don't send all of your email directly to spam. The protocols haven't changed but maybe the social contract around them has.
So my version of the boring internet is a little more bittersweet. I love that it's all still there. I want to be there. Maybe the next move is back down. Honestly though, I'm not sure I have the energy. That, I think, is what the veneer is really made of: convenience compounding until the alternatives feel like work.