About The Website

This page isn’t about Prithu Sanyal himself. It’s about this — the site you’re reading right now — and the small, stubborn adventure it took to get here.

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It didn’t start as a website It started as a refusal.

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He didn’t want another rented square of internet — another WordPress.com plan, another “your data lives on our servers” agreement, another service that could vanish, raise its price, or change its rules overnight. If he was going to have a place on the web that carried his name, he wanted it to actually be his. Not hosted by someone else. Not dependent on someone else’s goodwill. His, down to the hard drive it spins on.

That decision turned what should have been a weekend project — “just spin up a WordPress site” — into something much bigger: building an entire home server from scratch.

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The server before the site

Before there was a website, there was a machine: an old Lenovo laptop, repurposed and stripped down to run headless as prithuzserver, tucked away and administered entirely over SSH. No monitor, no keyboard, just a static IP on the home network and a terminal window.

Getting there meant learning things he didn’t know he needed:

How to partition and mount drives so that a server survives a drive going missing, how Docker and Docker Compose let a website, a cloud drive, and a home automation system all live side by side without stepping on each other, Why a home internet connection without a public IP address (thanks to an ISP running DS-Lite) means one can’t just forward a port and call it done — and how a Cloudflare Tunnel becomes the workaround that lets the outside world find a server sitting quietly on a home network, How fragile infrastructure looks in practice: a USB drive dropping out and taking a whole service down with it, a mistyped systemd unit name silently failing for a week before anyone noticed

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None of this was theoretical. Every lesson came from something breaking first.

Building the site itself

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Once the server could reliably stay online, WordPress went into a Docker container of its own, sitting quietly behind the tunnel, waiting to become something.

The plan for the site was never just “portfolio” or just “blog.” It needed to hold two lives at once — the engineering work of Prithu Sanyal, and the writing life of Prithu Sanyal — without either one crowding out the other. And because the story here spans languages and borders, the site is being built to speak three of them: English, German, and Bengali.

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That’s still in progress. As of now, this is a site under construction in the most literal sense: the scaffolding is up, the plumbing works, but the rooms are still being furnished.

Why bother

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It would have been easier to pay for hosting somewhere and skip all of this. But the adventure was the point. Every migration, every broken mount, every 2 a.m. troubleshooting session was also a chapter in a longer story — one being written down, in fact, in a Bengali-language memoir documenting the whole build as it happens. This website isn’t just a destination. It’s a record of the road taken to reach it: stubborn, self-taught, and self-hosted, one server rack decision at a time.

If you’re reading this page, you’re standing on that infrastructure right now.