29 December, 2025
by Mark Teisman
I'm happy to announce that this blog is now hosted on Boards of Music. Boards of Music is a place for hosting authentic content, away from US-based social media and cloud providers. Boards of Music is an ode to the personal website.
The project started after the start-up that I used to be a part of faced financial distress. The start-up, Gigstarter, is a platform for booking bands and DJs online. The distress happened at a time when I was re-viewing a lot of episodes of the Dutch music TV-show Vrije Geluiden. Particularly episodes from the time that Melchior Huurdeman presented the show, and when the show was recorded in the Amsterdam home for jazz and improvised music, BIMHUIS. I used to watch this show on Sunday mornings in my twenties, and have fond memories of that. The music often was just wonderful, and the interviews - sometimes uncomfortable awkward - did surface interesting insights most of the time.
When Gigstarter was sold to the highest bidder (who happened to be my friend and earlier co-founder of the company, Paul, who now runs the platform under his new company), my mind raced. Despite only having been loosely tied to the project in the last seven years (as that's when I stopped working for Gigstarter and moved to Booking.com), I faced some difficulty parting. It felt like an end of an era, and I wasn't totally really ready to say goodbye. And so it happened that I again became invigorated by a passion to do something for musicians. Each time I walked past the Amsterdam Conservatory on my way to the Booking.com campus, I crossed people whose arts I wanted to give a stage.
At a time when there a small exodus by conscious Europeans, away from US-based social media companies, I thought it'd be great if I could help artists could host their authentic websites.
Initially I wanted to create a simple LinkInBio website builder. Then I realized a core value for me would be that the websites the users would build would be hosted under a self-managed domain. And so I started building a generic platform for hosting static websites. Really in the space of Vercel and Netlify. Only I wouldn't hire a serious team of software engineers with San Francisco salaries, and so wouldn't have to charge for "premium services" such as hosting the website under custom domains.
The features I built for Boards of Music became partially overlapping with some of the Cloudflare offering. Obviously the product is less feature rich, but in my opinion easier to use. We're obviously also less robust, I did not seek to build or use a global content delivery network; we're nowhere near as sophisticated as Cloudflare when it comes to DDoS mitigation, nor will we ever (have to) operate at the scale of it. On the upside, though, next time Cloudflare goes down, your website will still be up.
I'm very conscious about the services I build on, and will commit to running our core applications on Europe-based infrastructure managed by European companies. For now the only thing not based in Europe is the domain registrar and the DNS provider for our core domains, but it is on the backlog to address this.
Interestingly, what started out as an initiative to provide an alternative online home for musicians, ended up being a generic platform, usable by all. And so this platform hosts my blog today, and it can host yours too. Maybe in the future I'll bolt on high-level products on top that would specifically suit musicians again. Though perhaps just documentation tailored to musicians would suffice, e.g. some article on how to host your Faircamp website on Boards of Music.
The areas where musicians did influence my design choices for Boards of Music - and this might surprise you - was in my decision to go CLI-first. That is, I built and API, and then a CLI, as opposed to a web UI. Self-hosting static websites, even at low costs, has been possible for ages. I estimate it is over 13 years ago when I first hosted a static blog on AWS S3. But having gone through this process recently: I don't really see the average musician going through this process - it's just too complex and cumbersome. S3 is not a whole solution for static site hosting with custom domains, and e.g. there's no one way to ensure the content is protected with HTTPS.
I went API and CLI-first, mainly for the reason that I believe a lot of static sites in the future will be built by somewhat less technical people, largely aided by LLMs. It is my belief that APIs and CLIs hat are pretty ideal interfaces for AI Agents to help people set up their site.
Overall building Boards of Music was a very interesting learning exercise, when I e.g. ran an authoritative DNS server for the first time, and implemented a generic framework for getting LetsEncrypt certificates for any (sub)domain - even the ones we don't own. I've come to understand a lot of design decisions made by Cloudflare, for example, and now have a pretty clear mental map for how to build e.g. "dynamic" applications (think a platform like Heroku) on top of the architecture we have today.
Boards of Music is a side project for me. I do incur costs, and I sponsor those from my own pocket. I am very frugal, and for that reason do impose quite strict limits to the resources you, as a user of the platform, get to use. For instance:
Furthermore, we don't store e.g. 3 replicas of your uploads, like AWS S3 would do by default. This means that we don't offer high durability guarantees. The idea is that the source data must always reside on your end, and that you should be able to re-publish your website if ever we lose your data.
Anyway, I'm kicking off the process of porting all the static websites that I host for myself and others. Away from AWS. Away from Netlify. Onto Boards of Music. Feel free to join me :)
Mark