Downgraded my website to GitHub pages; couldn't be happier | Hacker News Reader

Downgraded my website to GitHub pages; couldn't be happier

billwear.github.io

16 pointsbillwear11 comments

Just add a custom domain so you aren't locked in to github (you can migrate elsewhere easily, without losing any incoming links from other pages)

I host a number of services on a cloud server, but my website is still just using a static site with Cloudflare pages. If you just need a static site they are so simple to setup it's not been worth it to bother hosting myself.

Since the author declare being Emacs and org-mode user, I see no reasons for not using org-mode with Hugo and some ready-to-use theme on a personal domain, rclone to push the public part.

The setup is really minimal and the formal owner own anything. Being tied to a company means being at their mercy.

Emacs isn't really mobile yet.

Just didn't have enough to say to pay all that for a big-ass server. GitHub mobile app means I can update my site while sitting in conferences listening to boring rehash speeches.

> didn't have enough to say to pay all that for a big-ass server

Can you define "big-ass"? You'd be amazed what you can do on a $5/mo VPS.

$5/month + domain is going to be at least $70 a year. Whether that's cheap or expensive depends heavily on your personal situation, and what you're getting out of the site.

> $5/month + domain is going to be at least $70 a year. Whether that's cheap or expensive depends heavily on your personal situation [..]

Indeed, although if your personal situation involves "sitting in conferences listening to boring rehash speeches", as the OP stated, it's likely that $70 per year is effectively little more than a rounding error on your annual expenditure.

Git hub pages is a pretty nice service. Compare this to https://replit.com/ which pushes their deployment and you realize that for static website which can do a lot of things these days VS Code with great GitHub integration is just easier and better.

And it is easier/cheaper than Vercel too :)

Once you want some serverside/db things there are number of paths... Supabase, edge functions, DigitalOcean, AWS, Zapier hooks

I’m not sure what people mean by hosted now - I just have basic hosting with html, css, and ssh. Technically it supports php, etc but I only have that in a few places for silly reasons.

Some people seem to go all in on containers and AWS or similar for their personal site which seems overkill.

Or is this GitHub pages vs (say) squarespace? (Squarespace seems to result in functional and good looking sites)

I think 'hosted' has two meanings in this context which may be adding to your confusion. Clearly your own example refers to a 'host' server which you can connect to and can run scripts dynamically. GitHub pages is a static site service. Essentially you load your site into a CDN cache and serve from there. You don't really have a 'host' to connect to at all.

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