I want a static site of some kind. It’s simple to self host or host anywhere, and it’s also simple to secure and keep maintained for a long time.

I am currently looking at static site generators, like quarto, or docusaurus

However, they are difficult to theme to the “niceness” that I want, and their nature results in these somewhat fixed output formats. Like, it is somewhat difficult and annoying to put images anywhere I want them and etc.

Is there like a fixed WYSIWYG html editor? Something between designing a website from scratch and a static site generator.

Wordpress meets almost all of these requirements. It’s not static pages, but if you don’t use weird extensions it’s perfectly simple, secure, maintainable, WYSIWYG, and it falls exactly between from-scratch and a static site generator. Plenty of themes you can use and tweak in a modular fashion.

Although I’m pretty sure there are extensions that’ll render to static pages if you want. Certainly there are caching extensions that do almost the same thing.

Generally I’d recommend against Wordpress due to how shitty Automattic is being to the community, but it sounds like it fits your needs. Maybe Drupal as an alternatice.

You have several conflicting needs there. Why not just continue using Wordpress but without the weird extensions?

Delete your backups and do a full system upgrade.

There is no need to separate compute and storage unless there’s a reason for separating them. Usually that reason is redundancy and high availability, so that you can take down a compute node or storage node and still keep everything running.

Self-hosting means taking on those maintenance responsibilities yourself. Same as doing your own plumbing or car maintenance. Either you spend the time and effort yourself, or you pay someone else to do it.

There is no standard interchange format for this. Any migration you do is going to require a custom conversion, or a lot of copy-pasting.

I’ve been on Namecheap for years.

The “hard no” list is GoDaddy, Network Solutions, and anything owned by EIG. They are literally the worst. Probably Ionos (formerly 1&1) too.

And only a 3.28 TB database? Oh, because it’s compressed. Includes comments too, though.

mTLS is mutual TLS, more commonly known as client cert authentication (alongside the modern standard server authentication), for anyone else who has never heard of it by that name