owning the stack

Spent the week pulling things back in. The site, the content, the pipeline that ships it — all of it now lives where I can see the whole chain, not rented from a dashboard that can change its terms on a Tuesday.

The trade is real and worth naming. Managed platforms are easier on the first day. You click, it works, someone else carries the pager. What you give up is the part that matters later: when the pricing shifts, when the feature you built on gets sunset, when the algorithm decides your reach is now a line item. You don't own the audience you rented. You don't own the tools you rented either.

So: a plain Node host that auto-detects the framework and redeploys on a git push. No container theater, no YAML I'll never read again. The repo is the source of truth; the deploy is a side effect of committing. If the host disappears tomorrow, the whole thing moves somewhere else by Friday because nothing is welded to it.

It's slower to set up and quieter to run. That's the point. The leash is shorter when you're holding the other end.