AI for Everyone: my own blog moved from HubSpot to my server

For my educational brand AI for Everyone I moved the blog, the newsletter and the forms off the rented HubSpot platform and onto my own server, with artificial intelligence standing in for a team.

The client and the task

AI for Everyone is my blog about using artificial intelligence in practice. For two years the blog, the forms and the newsletter ran on HubSpot, an American platform that bundles a website, a contact database and newsletter sending into one subscription. It was convenient, but everything, readers’ data included, sat with a single outside provider. I asked myself whether one person with an AI assistant could replace a platform like that with their own tools without losing control over data, quality and time.

What I moved

One by one, the blog, the contact forms, the contact database and the newsletter came off HubSpot. The blog now runs on Astro on my own server, and the newsletter and forms on open-source tools I maintain myself. Newsletter sign-ups and form inquiries go straight into my own system rather than into an outside service. The site switches to dark mode on its own when a reader has that mode set in their system.

How: AI as my team

I worked alone, but not without a team, because artificial intelligence, Claude above all, played that part. I built the work around a second brain, a set of notes the AI keeps, holding decisions along with their reasoning and the measurements. I also split the roles: one session plans and writes the brief, and a separate one does the programming. I described the whole journey, mistakes and costs included, on the blog in the article Six Months Without New Posts (opens in a new tab). I write more about having your own server and about the second brain in the knowledge articles on this site.

What follows from it

Today I keep my whole presence online, the blog and the company site, on my own server. Readers’ data is with me, I pay no software subscription, and I make every change myself. It is the same way of working that I offer clients: owning your data instead of renting it.