Comment by Artemix | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Artemix | Hacker News Reader

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Static websites are the way to go, and as for hosting, I personally find Netlify to be awesome, and well fit for static websites (my blog is built with a custom SSG, run by Netlify on every commit).

You can simply use git for versioning, FrontMatter for article metadata (like title, published status etc.), reStructuredText or Markdown for writeup, and whichever tool you may see fit.

If you don't want to build your own, Hexo, Hugo or Jekyll are well-known, but if you want something a bit more "fit" for you, I'd recommend checking out Metalsmith.

As for the website hosting, you have a lot of available options due to the simplicity of hosting some dumb HTML pages and medias.

- Git hosts, like Github, Gitlab (my favourite), Bitbucket

- Netlify, Surge

- Some shared web hosting, like the base offers at OVH: When you buy a domain name, you have, for free, 10MB of space for a shared web hosting, which can easily serve HTML files. Buy a .xyz domain for less than 3€/year and have free hosting.

One issue I have with static sites currently is adding/editing content from mobiles. Although you can create/edit files (by commits) from GitHub.com via your browser, using the web interface, it's not really too pleasant to work with (since, obviously, it isn't designed for this).

If you could sync your files over to something like Google Docs / Dropbox Paper, edit them there, and see the changes be automatically published to GitHub, that would be nice.

Other than that, I find static sites very nice for blogs. I don't really think most blogs need something like WordPress, it does seem a bit overkill to me.

Thanks! Could you be specific about where to purchase a domain? Sorry I’m not an expert in web-based stuff.

Cloudflare Domains is soon a thing (meant to be available from later this month in waves to current Cloudflare users, my guess is it should be available for all start of 2019). That might be nice. Cloudflare promises not to charge more than how much it costs them to get the domain, so they are dirt cheap domains, and Cloudflare has a great reputation for tolerance/no censorship - so you don't have to be worried about having your domain terminated/suspended.

Currently, namecheap is also quite popular, it's not especially elegant but it's cheap and secure. Tends to be my personal choice. I would immediately point your DNS to Cloudflare, after purchasing a domain, and manage your domain's records from Cloudflare.

Also worth checking out: https://www.gandi.net/ and https://njal.la/

Usually, namecheap is a safe bet. That'd be my recommendation, currently.

>Cloudflare has a great reputation for tolerance/no censorship

Great but undeserved reputation. Cloudflare will ban your domain if a BigCo asks. Just try adding “doxagram.is” to your CF account.

I find http://domains.google.com to be the simplest.

It comes with built-in privacy protection* and a free email forwarding service. So all emails to hello@yourdomain.com could be forwarded to your email.

* with recent news around Google + privacy, I'd take this with a grain of salt.

I recommend either IWantMyName or Namesilo. They have great support and no B.S. upsells a lot of providers have. I am not affiliated with them, just a customer.

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