Self-hosted blogging platforms and microblogging engines for publishing articles, journals, and short-form content online. All available with one-click installation on 365i web hosting.
This is a small category and it is better to be honest about why. Two applications sit here: Serendipity, a classic self-hosted blogging platform, and GNU social, which is federated microblogging rather than a blog engine at all. Nearly everything else in self-hosted blogging went to WordPress, which W3Techs measured at 40.7% of all websites on 22 August 2026. If you are starting a new blog and have no attachment to either name below, install WordPress from the same one-click list and skip the rest of this page.
Serendipity is still worth knowing about. It is a small, BSD-licensed PHP blogging engine that has been going since 2002 and still ships: version 2.6.1 landed on 22 July 2026. It does categories, comments, RSS, plugins and templates, in a fraction of the code and database that a modern CMS carries around. For a site whose job is publishing text and photographs, that lightness is the feature rather than a limitation.
The hosted alternatives price differently rather than cheaper. Ghost(Pro) starts at $18 a month billed yearly for up to 1,000 members. Substack charges nothing up front and takes 10% of paid subscription revenue, with Stripe's fees on top of that. Medium owns both the presentation and the distribution. Self-hosting costs a hosting plan and the update work, and leaves the archive, the mailing list and the domain reputation in your hands.
Situations we see often. If one of these sounds like you, this category is worth a look.
Two thousand posts with inbound links and search rankings built up over a decade, on a hosting account that has to move. Upgrading in place on a current PHP version preserves every permalink, which no replatforming project can honestly promise.
A paid newsletter on a percentage model gives away a tenth of gross revenue forever, before card fees are counted. Self-hosting converts that into a fixed monthly hosting cost, at the price of running the list and the payments yourself.
One editor, four posts a month, a lot of scanned images, an annual budget around a hundred pounds and no appetite for a page builder. A small blog engine with categories and an RSS feed covers the whole requirement and leaves money for the domain.
Interoperability work sometimes needs a real OStatus-era server rather than a modern ActivityPub one. GNU social has a defensible use there, on a closed instance with registration shut off, and none at all as a public service.
Serendipity is a PHP-powered weblog application which gives the user an easy way to maintain an online diary, weblog or even a complete homepage.
That was written for the 1.0 release twenty years ago and the scope has barely shifted since, which is the interesting part. Serendipity never grew into a page builder or an application platform, so it stayed small enough for a handful of people to keep patched. Narrow software with a maintainer is a safer tenant on shared hosting than broad software without one.
In 2018, the mission of "Democratize Publishing" to me means that people of all backgrounds, interests, and abilities should be able to access Free-as-in-speech software that empowers them to express themselves on the open web and to own their content.
The operative phrase for anyone weighing self-hosting against a platform is owning your content. On Substack or Medium the archive, the subscriber list and the URL structure all live inside somebody else's product. Self-hosting moves those three onto hosting you pay for, and it moves responsibility for updates and backups along with them.
Hosting a blog well is mostly about three things we end up tuning for almost every site: PHP memory high enough to handle a busy media library, an opcache configuration that survives a publish-and-purge cycle, and a sensible image-optimisation policy so that 4MB phone uploads do not become 4MB page weight. We give all of that out of the box on our web hosting plans, plus a real server cron rather than the in-application scheduler so timed posts actually fire when you want them.
Serendipity is in good order. Version 2.6.1 was released on 22 July 2026, the project tracks current PHP (8.0 and above, with 8.4 compatibility added in the 2.6 line), and the codebase is small enough that one person can read it. It runs on our entry web hosting plan with no tuning beyond sensible defaults.
GNU social is not in good order, and that is the useful thing on this page. Its last stable release, 1.20.9, was in 2019. The version 3 rewrite has a public development log that stops on 1 April 2022 and never produced a stable build, and the old GitHub repository has had no pushes since 2018. Installers still offer it. Do not build a public community on it in 2026. Mastodon and GoToSocial are the maintained federated servers, and neither is PHP, so neither belongs on a shared account either.
Where a blog gets hungry. Image handling, every time: a 4MB phone photograph needs several hundred megabytes of memory to decode and resize, so we run PHP at 256MB or more and raise the upload limits at install. Federation is a different problem entirely, because a GNU social instance caches remote avatars and attachments, so your disk fills up from other people's activity rather than your own. Not for you if you want a new blog. Install WordPress.
Common questions we hear from people running blogging applications on 365i hosting.
WordPress, for almost everybody. It has automatic security updates, a plugin for anything you are likely to need, and thousands of developers who could take it over if you lose interest in maintaining it. Serendipity is the better answer in two situations: you already run one and want to keep your URLs and your editorial history, or you want the smallest possible blog engine and are content to be the only person who understands it. Both install in one click from the My365i control panel.
No. The last stable release was 1.20.9 in 2019, the version 3 rewrite stopped publishing development updates on 1 April 2022 without ever shipping a stable build, and the old repository has been untouched since 2018. It still installs, and a closed instance for testing old federation behaviour is a reasonable use. A public instance is not, because unpatched software that accepts open registration and federates with strangers combines the two things that most reliably go wrong on shared hosting.
No, and it is not really a limitation of our platform. Mastodon is Ruby on Rails with PostgreSQL, Redis, Sidekiq background workers and an object store for media, all running continuously. That needs a server rather than a PHP account, and even a small federated instance pulls in remote media that grows disk usage faster than most people budget for. A VPS or managed cloud server would run it, and so would a managed Mastodon host, which is often cheaper once you price your own time honestly.
Yes, with the same discipline any self-hosted application needs. 2.6.1 is current, the project ships security releases, and a small codebase with a short plugin list presents a smaller attack surface than a CMS carrying forty plugins. Turn comment moderation on, keep the plugin set short, and apply releases when they appear. Every package here is backed up daily with 30 days of restore points, which is what covers you on the day an update goes sideways.
Not much if you publish for free, and a great deal if you charge. Ghost(Pro) is $18 a month billed yearly at the Starter tier, so self-hosting saves a modest fixed sum and costs you the maintenance instead. Substack takes 10% of paid subscription revenue before Stripe's fees, so a publication earning £2,000 a month hands over roughly £200 every month regardless of what its hosting costs. That is the point where self-hosting stops being a preference and becomes arithmetic.
Yes, though it is an export and import job rather than a button. Serendipity can produce an XML or RSS export of its entries, and WordPress imports from RSS and from the common blog formats. Posts, dates and categories come across; the template and the permalink structure do not. Map the old URL pattern onto the new one with redirects before you switch, or the archive loses the search rankings it spent years earning. Keep the old install reachable until the redirects are verified.
Get Blogging apps up and running in minutes with our fast, reliable web hosting. Every plan includes one-click installation, free SSL, UK, US & Asia data centres, and dedicated expert support.
All prices exclude VAT. No contract, cancel any time.
All 2 blogging applications available with one-click installation on our fast UK web hosting.
