Self-Hosting on Dad's a Nerd!

Ghost Crashes on SVG Upload: The Missing Fontconfig Bug

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 20:56:50 -0400

If your self-hosted Ghost site returns a 502 Bad Gateway or Ghost’s own “We’ll be right back” page every time you edit a post, and recovers after a few reloads, the cause may not be anything you configured. The official Ghost Docker image ships without fontconfig. libvips renders SVG through librsvg, librsvg needs fontconfig to lay out text, and without it the process dies with SIGSEGV — taking your entire site down with it.

Host Your Own Email: Why It's Not as Hard (or Dangerous) as You've Heard

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 21:53:01 -0400

Running your own email server has a reputation as one of the worst ideas in self-hosting — guaranteed to get blacklisted, buried in maintenance, and delivered straight to everyone’s spam folder. Most of that reputation is inherited secondhand, from people repeating what they read rather than what they ran. This post covers what’s actually true, what actually goes wrong, and how Mail-in-a-Box handles the parts that genuinely used to be hard.