Article · September 27, 2026 · Dr. Safi Mojidi
Why we left our website platform, and what the site costs now
We moved hackingtheworkforce.org off a monthly website platform onto plain files we own, hosted for pennies. Here is the reasoning, the numbers, and what we kept paying for on purpose.
Small nonprofits rent most of their technology. The website is on a builder platform, the forms are on a second platform, email on a third, donations on a fourth, and each one bills monthly, raises the price when the plan renews, and makes leaving just hard enough that nobody does. We ran that way for years. This fall we decided to stop renting the website.
What was wrong
The website platform cost us a few hundred dollars a year. That is not a lot of money until you count what it bought. The site was slow to edit in any way the editor did not anticipate. Two of our volunteers could not safely change a page without breaking the layout. The 4C model pages, which we want every school to be able to copy, were locked inside a page builder that had no clean export. Old URLs we had shared in grant reports pointed at pages we could not reliably redirect. And the renewal notice arrived the same month we were deciding how to fund a participant’s training. One cohort seat is a real line item for us; the website fee was quietly competing with it.
The deeper problem was ownership. Our content lived in someone else’s database, in someone else’s format. If the price doubled, we would pay it, because the alternative was rebuilding from scratch under deadline.
What we moved to
The site is now a folder of plain HTML files in a Git repository we own. A short build script generates every page from a handful of source files, so the header, footer, navigation, donation band, and quick-exit bar are written once and appear everywhere. When someone changes a file, an automated job rebuilds the site, checks it for broken links, missing image descriptions, and leftover placeholder text, and publishes it to object storage behind a content delivery network. The change is live in about three minutes. There is no server to patch, no plugin to update, no login page for attackers to find.
Editing is simpler than it was. A volunteer can open a file in the browser, fix a sentence, and commit. If the change breaks a rule, the publish stops and the log says which line. Every version is kept, so undoing a mistake is one command.
What it costs now
Hosting the files and serving them worldwide costs us less than a dollar a month at our traffic, and the first year of the content delivery network is inside the provider’s free tier. The domain name still costs about twenty dollars a year, as it always did. The code hosting is free for a repository this size. The remaining recurring cost is the time of whoever edits the site, and that was true before.
We kept paying for three things deliberately. Email and shared inboxes, because running our own mail server is a security risk we do not want. A forms and email-sequence platform, because it routes people to the right program and we would rather spend volunteer time on people than on form plumbing. And a no-fee donation processor, because it passes one hundred percent of each gift to us. Owning the website did not mean owning everything; it meant owning the parts where renting was costing more than it returned.
What it took
About one working day, with an AI assistant doing most of the typing and a human making every decision that touched money, identity, or DNS. The build script, the infrastructure template, the redirect map for fifty-seven old URLs, and the publishing job are all in the repository. The step-by-step version is in the companion guide, and the student project brief turns the same work into a semester project a learner can do for another nonprofit.
Why we are writing this down
We train people for cybersecurity careers and we help the organizations that serve our communities stay safe online. Both of those are easier when an organization owns its technology and understands it. A nonprofit that can read its own website files can also read its own DNS records, its own access logs, and its own vendor contracts. That is the beginning of security, not an IT detail. So this section of the site will keep documenting, in public, what we run, what it costs, what breaks, and what we learn.