Ask HN: Create a Simple Website/Blog? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Create a Simple Website/Blog?

11 pointsneetokami13 comments

I've created a neocities website but I didn't like how hard it was to program, I understand you need a Domain and DNS setup with all of that, but my question is what is the absolute basic barebones way to go about this? For reference, I want this website to be simply split into a resume/professional side and a creative/personal side with very few pictures or graphics mainly just text. Which online services or steps should I take to achieve this? My only requirements for it is to have a custom name (with a .xyz or .com) and just a few redirect pages to different areas of the website.

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IMO this seems like a good use case for Wix, SquareSpace, etc.

If you absolutely must do it yourself, cheap and reliable hosts are nearlyfreespeech.net and Vercel.com. Both can take care of domain registrations too.

Vercel is more modern and easier to use; it's designed for modern Jamstacks but you can host regular HTML on it too, and it has a built-in CDN.

Nearlyfreespeech has been around a long time and offers old-school barebones hosting, much cheaper than a full-blown VM. And you can put free Cloudflare on top of it to cache/CDN/HTTPS it.

Cloudflare Pages is also another static option, but it's not as easy to use as Vercel. Github Pages is yet another (free but janky) option; I wouldn't recommend it over the others, but if you like Microsoft more, it's there for you.

All of these are much easier than managing your own VM, since they're PaaS specifically for web hosting and not just low-level VMs where you have to deal with OS updates, hosting software, and all the other pains.

You might also be eligible for the free tier of AWS, GCloud, etc., and they have certain higher-level services that can make this easier (like Google App Engine or AWS Amplify) instead of their low-level VMs.

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FYI, searching for "static site hosting" these days is probably better than "website hosting". The "web hosts" typically target small/medium businesses who don't know any better, whereas the static hosts target enterprise-y JS stacks. Hosting basic HTML static files on their CDN is a side effect for them, like a loss leader, so basically you take advantage of their cheap dev/test plans and never need to upgrade to their full enterprise setups.

First para: Totally agree.

I’m also a bit surprised that I so rarely see any shoutouts to AWS Amplify. I use it to host some Hugo sites and it’s incredibly convenient. Just put your site in a private (or public) GitHub repo, connect Amplify and there you go. (Manual DNS configuration not needed for those who use Route 53.) Couldn’t be simpler.

Opinion: Amplify seems like a good service on paper, but when when I tried to use it for a project last year, I kept running into issues. Some of the documentation was incomplete or outdated, the auth layer was confusingly implemented, and some of their sample components didn't seem to work...? I couldn't tell if Amplify was still under active development or abandonware.

Maybe I'm just dumb (I don't work with AWS much compared to the other clouds), but I found Vercel, Cloudflare, and Google Cloud all easier to use overall. AWS had so many layers and Amplify itself had different parts. It was hard for me to figure out exactly what I needed and to find the right documentation for it.

But still, it's probably a good option for people who are already in the AWS ecosystem. If they're not, in general I think the value-added resellers (i.e. companies like Vercel who make higher-level abstractions over the big clouds) are generally more user-friendly and have a lower management surface.

I host on GitHub Pages. It’s simple and free, and I have it setup so I’m using my own domain. When I want to update something, I make the update, commit/push it, and a few seconds later it’s live. Everything has to be HTML, CSS, and JS, but I’m ok with that. For a personal site, I want to keep it simple and low maintenance.

If you don't want to code at all: go with wix or squarespace. But it isn't free.

If you're okay with basic coding and setup, these are some opinionated steps:

1. Shopping

Go to Hugo (which is a website generator, kinda) and pick a theme you like. You now have a readymade website with random data. Eg: https://themes.gohugo.io/themes/minimal_marketing/

2. Get a copy of your site

Create a new repository in Github, setup the hugo site. Remember to replace the Ananke theme with the theme you like. You now have your own copy of the website you liked. https://gohugo.io/getting-started/quick-start/#create-a-site

3. Make your site accessible on the internet

Vercel is a hosting service. Log in, connect your Github account, choose the hugo repo. You can now access your website using a random URL from Vercel. https://vercel.com/new Also for your reference: https://vercel.com/guides/deploying-hugo-with-vercel#vercel-...

4. Give your site a fancy domain name

Buy a domain name on Dynadot (or namecheap etc). Then go to the domains setting on Vercel and follow the steps shown in the UI. You can now access your website using your domain name. Congrats! Link to the setting: https://vercel.com/docs/projects/domains/add-a-domain#naviga...

Now just edit whatever data etc you want on the Github repo, push it. Changes will be updated automatically.

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I use hugo for my blog: https://blog.dvsj.in

But my website is built from scratch (mostly because I just wanted to learn to do it): https://dvsj.in

If you're stuck at any point, happy to help. Contact is in my profile :)

I decided to build my blog and bought my domain just yesterday. Can you tell which theme you used for the blog. It looks pretty perfect for what I want for my use case.

A few years ago I wrote a pretty long tutorial for using hugo[1]. Maybe a bit outdated, but contains useful steps for integrating a full text search and some other tweaks.

[1]: https://pilabor.com/blog/2021/05/building-a-blog-with-hugo/

If you just want to put your text/images up, and don't need to allow users to comment, buy stuff, or that sort of thing, then you want a static website, written in html and css. Get a VM from the likes of Linode, and install a basic static website as shown here (https://www.linode.com/docs/guides/set-up-web-server-host-we...). You don't even need a static website generator; just edit the html yourself.

If using a static website, you can have Cloudflare do the https for you, Troy Hunt covers it here: https://www.troyhunt.com/https-is-easy/

Reading your description, the major challenge is about hosting static content with a proper DNS setup.

Then I would suggest you take a look at Vercel Hobby Plan + Godaddy domain. I hosts most of my website under this solution. I ever heard that Godaddy may be an overkill or over expensive, but it's affordable to me and it works, so I save time to do more research.

Here is some website example (I used to use NexT, but perhaps recommend Hugo / Docusaurus today), while a resume page can be too simple to use this "tools".

* https://www.tisonkun.com/blog/greptimedb-community-report#su...

* https://www.tisonkun.org/archives/

CloudFlare pages ftw!

If you really wanna get fancy , then maybe this https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/how-to/deploy-a-word...

i run a website via http://hostinger.com at like $1 a month, i know how to setup all these but dont want to go through the hassle of maintaining it etc and can concentrate on just writing

Try Framer Or Try Wordpress + Elementor

ghost

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