A website on your own computer.
Self-hosting normally means opening a door in your home network and hoping nobody unpleasant walks through it. MeshMorphic doesn't do that. Your computer opens no ports at all — it makes one connection outward, the same as a web browser does, and your site travels back down it.
Install
curl -fsSL https://mm.lightmorphic.co.uk/install.sh | sudo shIt asks you nothing — no account, no password, no email address. A minute later it prints your web address and a link to your settings page. Read the script first if you'd rather; it's the same file that's in the repository.
Why nothing can knock on your door
Four things are doing the work. None of them require you to understand networking.
Nothing is listening
No program on your computer waits for connections from the internet, so nothing can start one. There's no door to find, and nothing to scan, knock on, or break into. This is how the system is built, not a setting that could be wrong.
Encryption ends at home
The security certificate for your site, and its secret key, are created on your computer and never leave it. The public servers your traffic passes through carry sealed bytes they have no way of opening.
Your website is boxed in
Your site runs in its own sealed container with no route to the internet, to the rest of your home network, or to your computer. If it's ever compromised, the attacker lands somewhere with nowhere to go.
Nothing to reset
There's no account, so there's no password to steal, no support desk to trick, and no database of users to leak. Nobody can be talked into handing over your site because nobody has it to hand over.
Your address is your key
This is the idea the whole system rests on, and it's worth thirty seconds.
└──────────────────┘
calculated from a secret key that only your computer holds
Nobody assigns it
Your web address is a fingerprint of your computer's own secret key. It isn't handed out by a server, so there's no register to hack, and no authority that could be leaned on to give your address to someone else.
Nobody can take it
To claim your address, somebody would have to find a completely different secret key that produces the same fingerprint. That is not a thing anyone can do — not a company, not a government, not us.
You can point your own domain at it instead, which most people do. That's a single record at your domain provider, and the certificate is sorted out automatically.
The public servers hold nothing worth stealing
Two kinds of server sit between a visitor and your home. Both are built to be useless to whoever takes them over.
| Gateway | Entry point | |
|---|---|---|
| What it does | Introductions only | Passes visitor traffic through |
| What it stores about you | Nothing at all | Nothing at all |
| Can it read your traffic? | No — none passes through it | No — it holds no key |
| Can it take your address? | No | No |
| Can it pretend to be your site? | No | No — browsers reject it, loudly |
| If it's hacked | There's nothing to take; your computer uses a different one | It sees which addresses were visited and from where; it can refuse to pass traffic |
| If it disappears | Sites already running carry on | Your computer moves to another one |
A gateway genuinely knows nothing
No database. No list of users. No names. No log of who connected. It writes exactly one file to disk — its own key — and answers a single question: who else is out there?
It can't grant permission for anything, because there is no permission in this system to grant. An address is a calculation anyone can check, not a favour somebody does you.
Which is why anyone can run one
More gateways means the network is harder to disrupt. Running one costs almost nothing: no storage, negligible traffic, and no responsibility for anybody's data, because none of it passes through.
Run one on a spare server. The installer hardens the machine first and builds from source, so you can read exactly what you're running.
The catch, said plainly
Everything above has a cost attached. Here it is, rather than buried in a support article you'd find later.
! If you lose your recovery key, your address is gone for good
Nobody else has a copy of it. Not us, not whoever runs the servers your site connects through, not anyone. That's precisely why nobody can take your site from you — and it means if your computer's disk dies and you haven't written the key down, no one on earth can get your address back.
So write it on paper. It takes a minute, the settings page shows you exactly what to copy, and it's the same trade as a house key: nobody can let themselves in, and nobody can let you back in either.
Your home internet has to be up
Your site lives on your computer. If the power goes off or your broadband drops, your site is down until it comes back. That's fine for a personal site and wrong for a shop.
The free address is ugly
It has to be, because it's calculated from your key rather than chosen. That's the trade that removes the central register. Point your own domain at it and nobody ever sees the long one.
You're trusting the software
It runs on your machine. So it's kept small enough to actually read, and the source is published — including an honest account of what still has to be trusted.
What actually happens
- You run one command.It sets up two sealed containers and creates a key that only your computer will ever hold. It asks you nothing.
- Your computer dials out.It finds a gateway, learns where the entry points are, and opens one outgoing connection to each. Nothing is opened up on your end.
- You get an address and a certificate.The padlock in the browser is real, and its secret half never leaves your machine.
- You put your website in.Drag a zip of your site into the settings page on your home network. Add your own domain if you have one.
- You write the recovery key on paper.Please do this one.
Reading the source gives an attacker nothing
There is no shared secret anywhere in this system — no API key, no common signing key, no hidden credential. Every value that matters is created locally by the machine that uses it. Publishing the source reveals how it works and nothing else, which is the only honest basis for asking you to run something on your own computer.