Ask HN: Where do you host your personal blog these days? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Where do you host your personal blog these days?

61 pointsthakobyan66 comments

I've been using Medium for almost 2-3 years now to host my personal site and blog (https://tigran.nyc). I've started to feel I want something more customizable. Any suggestions will be appreciated.

View on HN

Look at static blog generators (hugo, jekyll) + s3 + cloudfront. You don't pay unless you have traffic.

Along these lines, I'm trying Github pages with Jekyll; works for me.

I'm going to second this, especially for a tech blog.

I sent one up in January. Despite not spending much time on it so far, there were a couple things I've already gathered from it.

First, is basic Git functionality. Without having much experience with remote repos, it provided me a good opportunity to try things out without being able to break too much. I essentially write up posts locally, then push them to a GitHub repo. Super simple.

Second is Linux and SSH. I have local repos on a Linux machine at home. I can SSH into the machine, write up a post, then push it out. I had very little knowledge of Linux and SSH prior. It's been pretty helpful.

The biggest thing I think it offers is convenience. I have a very simple way of writing posts, no matter where I am. It's pushed me to learn new systems (ones that a lot of people are already familiar with) and it allows for a simple means of fixing things (through GitHub's interface) in case I do break anything.

Static generators are what I'd recommend (my preferences are Hugo and Nikola) but instead of s3/cloudfront I use Netlify to deploy.

I've commented about Netlify before but they really are pretty great. The free tier is enough for a personal blog.

I've also used GitLab pages, but their integrated CI can be pretty slow (sometimes taking several hours to run) and I got frustrated with that, but they're a solid choice when not having those issues.

Hugo + Github is killer. So is Jekyll on Github, I just prefer Hugo because it's easier to setup locally and also allows greater theme control.

my site: https://cmp.is repo: https://github.com/0xcmp/cmpis.github.io-hugo

It's my understanding you can't deploy HTTPS on a github hosted Jeckyll site that's using - has that changed?

(To clarify: https:github.com/shitpostingblog, but https://shitbpostingblog.xyz is not)

You can. I did it with cloud flare.

You can do a https proxy like cloudflare

You can use the cloudflare free plan. The user will see https. Traffic will be encrypted between the user and cloudflare, but not between cloudflare and github. For a personal site that's not transmitting PII over the wire, I don't see a problem with that.

Or if you are lazy, just github. https://github.com/divbit/blog

Neocities. Static files, I rarely post. I pay the $5 to have a custom domain and support the site.

Mostly because I support what Neocities wants to be and I loved the old Geocities community. I'm not active in the Neocities community due to time but I do my best to encourage others to join. :)

I could find alternative hosting for $2/mo that would suit my needs but don't.

The main purpose of my site is for easier sharing of things: programs I use, anime recommendations, music recommendations, and how to contact me.

I'm using Jekyll + Firebase Hosting on my blog[0]. Currently looking into switching to Hugo[1] as it doesn't require Ruby and claims to generate pages much faster.

[0]: https://citrusui.me/blog

[1]: https://gohugo.io

I can attest, Hugo is very fast. You might want to look into https://www.netlifycms.org/ (works with Hugo among others), and https://github.com/netlify/victor-hugo if you want to use Gulp/Webpack in your workflow.

Thanks. Netlify's dashboard has improved a lot since I last used it (which was a month or two ago.)

you can also take a look at https://github.com/jbrodriguez/hugulp. It's a simple asset optimization tool specially designed for Hugo

This is a solved problem. Use WordPress. It's insanely customizable, has a huge ecosystem and now runs 27% of the sites on the web.

> How do people implement live dashboards on the web these days?

> This is a solved problem. Use Flash. It's insanely customizable, has a huge ecosystem and now runs x% of the sites on the web.

This is argumentum ad populum. Lots of people used Java applets or Flash just a few short years ago, and I think we can all agree that the current HTML5/CSS3/JS ecosystem is much better.

When the goal is marketing or communication it's rational to use the more popular ecosystem. The huge ecosystem gives you a huge advantage in getting things done and there are no bonus points for being right in advance. This is as true with blogs today as it was for flash a few years ago. Over the past five years many companies have essentially set fire to their money making HTML5 versions of their flash games, reinventing the wheel for multiple tools in their setup and extend development time only to find their HTML5 versions got worse reviews and were still buggy on some browsers.

And unlike flash vs HTML5, your choice of blogging back-end does nothing to extend your reach. Flash sites weren't usable for iPhone users but WP absolutely is. Not only that, but there are thousands of free themes and plugins to optimize the experience.

The rational way to pick a platform is to evaluate them based on the advantages they offer you now. For most sites now that's not going to be flash. For most blogs it's going to be WP with the occasional feeder post to Medium/LinkedIn/Facebook.

wp is great but too heavyweight for me

I used to run wordpress on a digitalocean FreeBSD VPS (and before that I was using some janky Ruby-on-Rails based blog engine), but I eventually grew tired of administering my own server just for a blog.

Now, I pay $2.95/month to have wordpress.com host it. I know it's not a very l33t solution, but the migration was easy and it works well enough. I get ~10 visitors a day, so it really doesn't matter, I suppose. It's mostly just a dumping ground for whatever nonsense pops into my head from time to time: (https://jamesadam.me/).

I recently switched my old VPS-hosted Wordpress blog to a static site generated by Middleman[1] hosted on Github pages[2]. It's been a really nice way to maintain flexibility of design with a huge boost to performance and improved development/writing workflow. I use markdown so I can even write my articles in a markdown editor if I want to.

[1] https://middlemanapp.com/ [2] http://paulzaich.com/

I use a workflow that goes Hugo <==> GitHug <==> Netlify

Completely automated, blazing fast, and all 3 are FREE. Netlify even includes basic SSL for free (!!!), and that what I've implemented on all my Netlify hosted sites.

Here's 1 of my blogs that I maintain using this setup. https://www.pawpurrazi.com/

I've also made a youtube video tutorial showing you step by step how to do this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSwoCvd4QIc

I came to this setup from previously using WordPress to host all my blogs and then getting tired of dealing with all the security holes, performance bottlenecks and "pharma hacks" that come with it. I did evaluate Jekyll as the blog engine, but the lack of incremental builds was a dealbreaker for me. Hugo has incremental builds from v 0.16 onwards, and it is also super fast, I tested with 5000 posts, builds in a few seconds.

DISCLAIMER: I don't work for Netlify nor am affiliated with them. I find their service to be blazing fast and their support is excellent (even for free tiers), so I made the video a while back for everyone else to use. The co-founders Matt Biilmann and Chris Bach are both super smart and answer questions promptly, Matt also appears to have deep technical knowledge when it comes to caching, security, performance etc.

Wrote my own thing on top of Go's http package. It handles subdomains to a limited extent and will also serve Markdown-formatted blog entries. I run it on a RAM Host KVM-based VPS, which I also use as a shell box and a traffic-forwarding endpoint when I'm on untrusted networks. The RAM Host VPS is a little expensive but after some incredibly frustrating experiences with the idiots at ChicagoVPS, the lack of drama has been well worth it.

I host Ghost on a digital ocean VM. $5 a month isn't too bad hosting anything.

Hugo + Digital Ocean [0]. I find it a powerful low cost combination with a lot of flexibility.

- [0] https://www.robinwieruch.de/own-website-in-five-days/

GitHub pages, and I use nginx to add SSL and proxy to it through one of my servers.

This is a nice solution but if you have any readers that don't live near you, you may want to think about using Cloudflare for SSL termination. SSL can add unacceptably high latency to connection costs for people who are not in close proximity to your host. A typical HTTPS handshake using TLS requires 4 round trips assuming no packet loss. The Cloudflare CDN does a great job of making sure this penalty is reduced as much as possible by having edge nodes as close to as many users as possible. Just something to think about.

edit: You may even want to think about using something like netlify. The free tier is easily generous for all but the most popular personal blogs and if you outgrow it you probably will be able to make enough revenue to pay for better hosting anyways.

Absolutely not. CloudFlare is a cancer on the net. I won't trade security for centralization and marginal speed improvements, my blog is pretty slim anyway.

Jekyll + S3 bucket's static website + Cloudfront

S3 bucket static website is great. I have also hosted React apps with full routing by setting 'error' page to 'index.html' on the S3 bucket properties.

Right now, I'm using WordPress.com since it's pretty simple to use and the editor works really well.

I'm looking into a better way to host a blog, but it will be a while until I do.

I use Octopress and host content on NearlyFreeSpeech.net. I like it over gh-pages because I can run TLS on the root domain and can tweak server headers via .htaccess. On top of that, static hosting at NFS is extremely cheap. 2016 cost me 82 cents. I get maybe 5k visitors/month and use 300mb/month. I cheat on bandwidth by caching at Cloudflare heavily. Without CF my bandwidth would be double (but still pretty cheap!).

Nothing special, just a wordpress self-install hosted on linode. I don't blog much, and haven't had a need to use anything more modern.

My site is written in React + Next.js (https://github.com/zeit/next.js/) and hosted on now (https://zeit.co/now).

On a Hetzner box I have a bunch of other sites on. The code is about 30 lines of Ruby using an existing Postgres/Datamapper-based framework. No need for indexing or search (Google does that), comments (no thanks), just the trivialest of CRUD.

Netlify with a GitHub post-update hook to automatically build and deploy when I push. No muss no fuss with free SSL termination provided by letsencrypt and low latency handshakes across the globe. Now if only I had something to write...

Jekyll and Gitlab Pages: https://about.gitlab.com/2016/04/07/gitlab-pages-setup/

OpenShift + Spress https://www.openshift.com/ It uses Github workflow

I use Pelican (static generator) and host on Digital Ocean (calebmadrigal.com).

Pelican is great. I have it installed on a local vm which I use for composing then I push the static files to the webserver (ramnode). (www.adammelton.com)

I'm also a big ran of ramnode and pelican. I've had a host there for the past 4 years

I mostly write the technical blogs on my website[1] with jekyll and my medium account for just random thoughts.

[1]: http://www.bauva.com

I have recently enjoyed using the Standard App Engine to host my personal site. I have wercker run the middleman build and then the gcloud app deploy. Works well for me.

Hostgator, I starting using it a bazillion years ago and it hasn't broken yet. I'm almost certainly hackable, but it works.

I've been using budgetvm's openvz VPS's for 2 yrs. Fairly happy, plenty of options for space if you need it.

Ghost(Pro). Support has been fantastic with responses to emails measured in hours, not days (even on weekends!).

I've use Ghost on Digital Ocean for a few years now. $5/month is pretty cheap. No issues so far.

Linkedin because most of my postings are aimed at increasing my professional development/reputation

Blogger. I am planning to migrate it to Pelican (getpelican.com) on DigitalOcean soon.

python based Static site generator Nikola hosted on digitalocean along with a few other sites.

The advantage over pelican:

1. python notebook (Jupyter) is a first class citizen

2. I can set custom urls for each post. same as the previous blog system from which I am migrating

On Wordpress but am slowly in the process of moving to a hugo/s3 pipeline

Jekyll --> Ubuntu + nginx on OVH (Canada) VPS.

Svbtle. Ghost is nice. GitHub Pages is fine.

AWS RI t1.small $15/mo/year.

GitHub and CloudFlare for the padlock.

Hugo + GitHub pages + AWS Route 53

Thanks so much everyone!

Jekyll on Github.

pastebin as before.

webfaction is great

jekyll on surge.sh

Chances are, nobody cares and nobody finds your site in the first place. Just keep a desktop zimwiki or a diary. I recommend using fountain pens, they are lovely tools to write with.

People read successful people's blogs, not yours nor mine (had one 15 years ago, no one read that either). So stop wasting time on tweaking the front porch and work on the piping instead.

I am a fairly unknown random person, and I get about 100 people a day to my personal blog, hosted on github pages. I don't promote it at all, it's mostly organic search results on whatever problem I've had to solve or solution I've discovered. I post once every few months.

Occasionally I get an email thanking me for a post, or correcting some error.

I'd say that largely depends upon the content. For the content in the original post, I'd generally agree that there isn't likely a huge audience. For some niche (often technical) topics/articles however, the content can be a very valuable resource to interested readers.

Additionally, writing blogs/or blog like articles on one's own site doesn't necessarily have to be directed at growing an audience. I personally think that adding some formality to writing (which might not exist in a diary) and publishing it can produce some useful notes for the author to reflect upon later. If nothing else writing short articles can serve as useful practice in writing down and expressing ideas. Of course there is still plenty to be said about the benefits of pen and paper which people do seem to overlook.

Why so pessimistic? Maybe when writing a blog you won't get more than a handful regular readers, but keeping it public stimulates you to talk about you, your job, and the solutions you got when encountered a problem (sure, you won't talk about how much you love your dog, I hope).

I'd also say that a well kept blog may be more important than a CV since you can actually tell how good you are in your job.

To answer the question: I used to blog with pelican, and now hugo.

I guess it came through like that unintentionally. I had a bad time dealing with procrastination back then, where I was writing up snippets and thoughts on a blog instead of working on projects that really pushed me forward in life. Tweaking html and whatnot.

I feel that most people crave attention more than they crave growing in whatever they are writing about. Maybe it all boils down to how I felt back then. These days, I read much more and write very little. It fits me at the moment, and I am better for not craving others attention and approval.

Oh well, I'll stick to fountain pens for now. :)

Well not with that attitude.

I host an (unknown) personal blog on AWS running Django

Reply on news.ycombinator.com