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seam_carver

On a related topic, people seem to not like me using Medium. What platforms do you recommend?

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Github.io is a surprisingly good option. Gitlab.io if you like gitlab better.

Substack seems pretty popular and not terrible.

Edit: Apparently a bad idea: Dev.to seems to be fairly decent, and maybe more like medium.

Hosting your own static site via netlify (or similar services) is only the cost of a domain name.

Hosting your own vps-based site on gcp is also only the price of a domain name, and if you put the also free cloudflare in front of it, it scales well, but this route does mean a lot more maintenance than any of the options above.

Dev.to is banned by HN so that’s limiting.

This is definitely news to me. Why?

I'd guess due to too many low quality or spammy submissions from there.

The other answer is apparently the reason. It’s a shame, too, because it flags people as self-promoting even if they’re posting interesting articles that have no self promotion at all.

Have a scan through the homepage. I often find the same few people posting broad questions over and over again to generate engagement. On top of that I feel most of the article titles tend to be click bait. I have come across one or two really good articles but they are very much the exception.

I asked this same question last week:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27108910

If you host a static blog I don't think you don't need cloudflare.

If your data is metered, is a good idea for peace of mind. Otherwise you risk someone dosing you and getting a large bill. That applies to both static or dynamic content.

Could you explain how that would work? I thought DOS generally worked by overloading a host with mostly invalid incoming packets.

Are DOS attacks that cause lots of outgoing bandwidth common? And wouldn't launching such a DOS attack be somewhat expensive in the first place?

Also, I don't think any of the hosting companies I use have metered bandwidth. I assume that if I used excessive bandwidth I'd just end up saturating the network, but for a blog with mostly text and a few images that shouldn't be an issue.

> I thought DOS generally worked by overloading a host with mostly invalid incoming packets.

It's any traffic. It can be invalid packets if that's effective, but it can also be complete http requests.

> Are DOS attacks that cause lots of outgoing bandwidth common?

They're commonly about saturating the incoming bandwidth. But there's nothing wrong with more outgoing traffic if someone wants to hit you that way.

> And wouldn't launching such a DOS attack be somewhat expensive in the first place?

Not if you're using other people's hacked endpoints. (Which is pretty much the default these days)

If you use a service with just a data cap, that's fine. I commented with AWS / GCP / others in mind.

As example: The comment above explicitly mentioned using GCP. GCPs "free" tier includes a whopping 1 GB of free traffic each month, everything over that is individually billed. (Arguably the correct answer is "don't use cloud hosts for such things, their bandwidth is stupidly overpriced for this use case", not "use a CDN to mitigate that")

DoS is often misunderstood.

It's perfectly normal for legitimate traffic to accidently DDoS you if you have low specs (or a huge unwieldy site) and get a link somewhere popular like HN.

I run a blog on a small cloud VM. If it made front page of HN all those visitors would DDoS my site "by accident" in no time.

Don't forget, accessing a website the normal way is outbound bandwidth.

Incidentally, I like to use my blog to explain topics that aren't widely understood outside of tech people or domain specific experience.

Maybe I should be a bit more active and explain things like this?

Cloudflare Pages [1] is relatively new, but I recently had a pleasant experience using it for a small static site recently

[1] https://pages.cloudflare.com/

Gcp bandwidth is only free up to 1gb. The site I host on there would easily exceed that with without cloud flare in front.

Besides, it lowers latency for users by being a real cdn with a lot of points of presence, and therefore improves the experience.

I simply use <blogname>.github.io with Markdown and some default Jekyll template. It's not fancy, but it works.

I would recommend self hosting (as in renting a cheap VM somewhere) or leveraging Github pages. You don't need a platform for this kind of content.

Counterpoint: you don’t need to go through the setup and management hassle of self hosting for this kind of content.

I personally like posthaven, if you don’t mind paying $5 / month and you want it to stay up “forever” :) Otherwise github pages is probably the way to go

I’m still back on V1.0 but I’ve been happy with ghost.

https://ghost.org/

Medium used to be fine but then they paywalled everything and it's basically now the Pinterest of blogging.

Don't listen to them.

The biggest obstacle to blogging is vacillating endlessly about the perfect place to post it. Post wherever it's easiest.

(none of the people who reply to this comment will actually blog regularly; they just like to give advice)

The biggest obstacle to blogging is not writing content. Compared to the effort of writing a good blogpost, switching hosts is fairly trivial.

The hardest part of blogging is having something interesting or valuable to say.

I assume everything on Medium is professionally stupid, based on what I've read there so far.

There's also the issue that Medium wanted me to log in to read his post (I simply flushed cookies instead).

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