Hello, I’m Kei.
This blog lives on h.keikun.info, a server I run at home. I usually write about tech topics and hobbies here, but today I’d like to talk about the site itself — namely, why I’ve been running a website on a home server for 23 years, and the philosophy behind it. I recently had a chance to reread the terms of use I wrote long ago, and the gap between who I was then and who I am now was interesting enough that I wanted to put it all into words.
This Site Is Also a Hosting Service
It’s not widely known, but this site is more than a home for my blog — it’s also a hosting service that offers free web space and email addresses to anyone who wants them. As described on the service overview page (Japanese only), you can publish HTML pages, run Perl CGI and PHP scripts, customize the web server with .htaccess files, and send and receive email. There are no ads, either. Each user gets a URL in the form https://h.keikun.info/~username/ and an email address like username@h.keikun.info. That old-fashioned tilde URL might bring back memories for some of you.
It’s free. The terms of use (Japanese only) state: “Free. I have no intention of ever charging a fee, now or in the future.” To let you in on a secret, my home internet contract doesn’t allow me to run a commercial server in the first place — but even setting that aside, I never intended to charge money from the start.
It All Started in 2003, in the ADSL Era
I set up this server in 2003, when I was a third-year university student. ADSL was finally becoming widespread in Japan, and the phrase “always-on connection” still sounded fresh. Until then I had been on metered ISDN, carefully watching my monthly allowance under NTT’s flat-rate discount plan. Coming from that world, being able to stay connected 24 hours a day felt like the world itself had changed.
The trigger was nothing more than curiosity. If I published a homepage from the computer in my room, I could connect with the entire world. That fact alone was fascinating, so I set up a web server and built my own page. That’s how it began.
Back then, there was a culture of sites connecting to each other through webrings and link collections. Rather than searching with a search engine, you would follow someone’s links page to the next site, and the next, stumbling onto unexpected pages along the way. It was a fun way to wander the web. In that same spirit, I thought that if I offered a place for people to publish their homepages, some kind of communication might grow between me and the users. With that hope, I started lending space to others, not just hosting my own pages.
The Twenty-Something Me, Preserved in the Terms of Use
Rereading the terms of use now, I find some rather sharp-edged lines: “Ask politely and I’ll answer politely; ask carelessly and I’ll answer carelessly,” or “Don’t use this server for anything bad. I’m watching, you know.” I wrote those in my twenties, and I suppose I had a bit of an edge back then. I’m planning to soften that wording sometime soon.
That said, there were reasons it ended up written that way. Most users were decent people, but not all of them. Some signed up and never used the space at all. Some posted defamatory content. One person used the space as a file server and then sublet it to someone else. The worst case was someone who planted a CGI script designed to attack other servers, turning my machine into a stepping stone. Account creation has always been done by hand — by me — and the oddly specific rule that you must “publish the first version of your content within one week of account creation” exists because too many people had me set up accounts they never once uploaded to. Every line in those terms has its own corresponding incident.
Here and there in the terms you’ll find notes that read, “Outrageous as it sounds, there was actually a user who did this.” Every one of them is a true story. As a record of what happens when an individual opens up a server in good faith, the document may have some value after all.
Ten Users at the Peak, Two or Three Today
At the peak, I believe there were about ten users. Today, only two or three still seem to be actively updating, and I plan to take stock of the dormant accounts sometime soon and reset them.
The site still has help pages for things like configuring email in Outlook Express and setting up FFFTP. They’re guides for software nobody uses anymore — sedimentary layers from 23 years of operation — and honestly, it’s about time I cleaned them up too.
Twenty-three years is enough time for everything to change. The internet used to be a hobbyist’s world; now, with smartphones and tablets everywhere, it’s part of everyday life. If you want to publish something as an individual, there are countless free options, starting with social media. The practical meaning of an individual lending out web space on a home server has, frankly, almost disappeared.
Why I Keep Going Anyway
Even so, I intend to keep this service running.
In a word, it’s because computers raised me. I studied information science at university and have worked at an IT company for 20 years, and underneath all of that is the experience of setting up servers with my own hands when I was young — breaking them, and fixing them again. Renting a server or using the cloud is simply not the same as running a physical machine in your own room; the quality of the experience is different. The nights I spent at a loss because the OS wouldn’t boot — all of it was part of the education. That’s why I believe offering a technical foundation to people who want to get interested in computers and learn is a good thing to do.
Laws and times have changed, so things aren’t as freewheeling as they used to be. Still, I’m always looking for what I can offer within the bounds of what’s possible. Leaving something behind for the next generation — that’s the feeling I carry now.
Applications Are Still Open
Even now, I receive a few applications a year. I’ll be honest: I haven’t replied to any in the past few years. I do read every email. Whether I reply depends on what the application says.
Given everything that has happened in the past, I now want to screen applications before creating accounts. This site was built with the hope of doing something for young people who are interested in computers. Applications that run against that spirit will generally not be accepted.
On the other hand, if you’re curious about computers and want to try touching HTML or a web server for the first time without spending money — people like you are exactly who I’ll keep accepting. As it happens, when my provider’s policy change made it impossible to run a public web server the old way, I set up a dedicated environment with a static IP, so technically I can now do things that weren’t possible before. Even so, the policy stays the same.
If you’re interested, please tell me about your enthusiasm through the application form (Japanese) or the contact form.
To Readers Overseas
One more recent change worth mentioning: over the past month, I built a system for posting to WordPress from Claude Code — and incidentally, this is the first article I wrote together with Claude’s newly released model, Fable 5 — and as part of that, this site now has English pages — including the one you’re reading now.
I don’t speak English myself. But thanks to AI, creating English pages has become easy, and I find myself increasingly hoping to interact with people overseas who don’t speak Japanese. The web space application page doesn’t have an English version yet, but if you’re interested, please reach out through the contact page. I’d like to study English too, so let’s communicate.
Closing Thoughts
The server I set up out of curiosity in 2003 has now been running for 23 years. Even as the internet changed from a hobbyist’s playground into a part of everyday life, one line has never changed: “Free. I have no intention of ever charging a fee, now or in the future.”
Its practical meaning may have faded, but if this place can be someone’s first encounter with computers, somewhere out there — that’s enough for me.
— Kei